But don’t worry – you don’t need to start learning how to code or stressing out about a long, drawn out design process. Of course you can always hire a professional web designer, but if you don’t have the budget, follow along with us.

Let’s start to design a website in 2020.

Step 1: Determine Your Site’s Objective

The first step in designing your new website is to determine what the main objective of your site is. Why are you creating this website? How does it need to function?

There are many different types of websites. You might want to create a one of the following.

• Online store
• Portfolio
• Blog
• Landing page
• Resume
• Event site
• Brand website

And each one can be just as equally important as the next.

While each one will have different pages, copy and visuals, what they all have in common is that you need to follow each of the next steps to get to completion.

Step 2: Pinpoint Your Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is one of the most important things you’ll do, as it’s the address to your website. It needs to both match your business name and be easy for your customers to type into their navigation bar.

This means you don’t want to include numbers, hyphens and other characters within your domain name. You want to be able to easily say your website URL and have someone be able to type it in without any trouble.

Regardless of where you choose to host or set up your website, you’ll need to purchase a domain name from a registrar.

If the business name you’ve chosen isn’t available, you might want to look into changing it unless you’ve already started to establish your presence. If this is the case, you can start to look into different domain extensions.

There are a variety of extensions, like .com, .co, .net, .online, .site and more, but the most common one is .com. This is why it’s a good idea to choose a basic .com website, however you can still work with other domain extensions.

Once you’ve found your domain – ideally yourbusinessname.com – it’s time to click that buy button and make sure you own it. You’ll have to renew your domain name each year, but many of them are only about $10-20 each time.

Step 3: Choose Your Website Platform

Now that you know what type of website you plan to create, your next step is to choose your website platform.

We’re covering four of the most popular website platforms, each for varying website objectives and design knowledge. If you know how to design a website using a bit of code and content blocks, some could be easier for you than others.

WordPress

Easily the most popular website platform, 20% of self-hosted websites are powered by WordPress. This is because it’s so incredibly versatile and customizable.

You could look at five completely different websites that have absolutely no design elements in common, and each one could still be a WordPress website.

But with great power comes great responsibility.

Yes, you can create a robust and completely unique website with WordPress. But it also requires you to get your own hosting plan, purchase and upload your theme, and fully build your website from the ground up.

Hosting

Let’s start with the first thing you’ll have to take care of if you choose to create a WordPress website, and that’s your website hosting.

There are many different hosting options, like , Siteground, each with their own plans based on what you might need for your website.

For a blog or portfolio website, you might be able to get away with a shared hosting plan, but if you’re building a website for an online store or another area where people would be inputting their payment information, you’ll need a better, more secure option.

Themes

The next thing you need to know about WordPress websites is that you’ll have to purchase a separate WordPress theme.

While, yes, WordPress does offer a few free and paid options, you’ll find a lot more variety if you check out an online market like ThemeForest.

There, you can browse through professionally designed themes that fit various website categories, like a blog, an e-commerce website, a real estate site and more.

Once you find a theme, you can purchase it through ThemeForest and download the theme’s zip file to upload to your WordPress website.

Plugins

Another thing that really sets WordPress websites apart from the rest of the platforms we’ll mention is the ability to add plugins to further customize your website.

There are WordPress plugins that allow you to connect analytics, create an online shop, easily change your design, make it easy to share blog content and more.

Often, the ability to add and take advantage of the thousands of plugins causes people to choose WordPress, but if you want something much more basic, we have more options.

Shopify

Shopify is a web application that allows you to create your own online store.

It provides you with a wide range of ‘themes’ that can be customized to meet your own branding requirements, and allows you to sell either physical or digital products.

A key aim behind Shopify is to let users without coding or design skills build an online store without the help of a developer — however, people who are familiar with HTML and CSS will be pleased to discover that the platform allows you to access both.

How does Shopify work?

Shopify is a ‘hosted’ solution. This means that it runs on its own servers and you don’t have to buy web hosting or install software anywhere.

You don’t own a copy of the product, but pay a monthly fee to use it — and, so long as you have access to a web browser and the internet, you can manage your store from anywhere.

With Shopify, the key things you need to build and market an online store — like templates, a payment processor, a blog and even email marketing tools — are provided ‘out of the box.’

That said, you can customize your store to meet more individual requirements through the addition of apps — more on which later — or using custom code.

Drupal

Drupal 8 is the latest, greatest release of the world’s most widely used enterprise web CMS. It’s fast. Flexible.  Drupal 8 taps into the concentrated innovation from its open source community. You can drive value and streamline your work with new capabilities for successful digital experiences.

Drupal 8 has something for everyone who supports online content and digital experience at your organization: business decision makers, site administrators, digital marketers, content managers, web developers, technical architects, and IT pros.

Drupal 8’s core platform has more than 200 new features built in. But it’s more than a collection of features; Drupal 8 is a platform you can use to achieve digital success.

Joomla

For websites that require user accounts, registrations, and other features, Joomla CMS development is perfect. It provides extensive user management features, and its admin interface is simply out-of-the-world. Easy to understand and navigate, it offers superior control over the site’s operation.

These are not the only benefits Joomla provides. The list is endless. Explore it for real by hiring the best web development company in Johor, Malaysia. Get in touch now for the best CMS solution!

Step 4: Select Your Theme/Template

Now that we’ve shown you the website platforms and where you can find themes or templates for each one, it’s time to jump right into this next step.

After signing up for your website platform of choice, start browsing through your design options. While each website will likely still need tons of customization to fit your brand and web page needs, this helps provide a great starting point.

If you’re choosing a WordPress theme, you’ll have to upload the zip file under the Appearance > Themes section in your left sidebar.

Each other website platform will allow you to activate the theme internally, since you’ll be choosing your selection right from their website.

Step 5: Create Your Site Map

The next step in designing your website is to create a site map and determine how many pages you need to create.

The reason creating a site map is such an essential step is so that you don’t go in blindly and not have a full idea of what your website will cover.

A good site map tends to include pages like:

• Home page
• About page
• Product/services page(s)
• Blog
• Contact page

Of course, each business and website objective is different, so just make sure you cover the most important services, features, aspects, etc., of your business within your website.

You can use a flowchart like the one below to help you organize the way your website should look and where pages should live in your navigation.

Step 6: Write Your Website Copy

Once you know which pages you’re going to need on your website, you can start writing your website copy. While website copy doesn’t necessarily need to be long, it does need to be enticing.

You want your website copy to really draw your website visitors in so they take action and start to work with you and your business.

Here are a few tips to start writing compelling website copy that drives conversions.

Talk to your ideal customer.

Be sure that when you’re writing your website copy, you’re keeping your target audience in mind. Write directly to them, because they’re the ones that are going to be reading this.

You want to write in a way that convinces them to take action, not the whole world or a different market segment. Only talk to the people who would be in the market to buy your product or service.

Keep it short and concise.

Website copy is not a blog post. It needs to be straight to the point, a paragraph (at most) at a time in each section of your home page.

Even on our website, the longest of our landing pages has only about 1,200 words, while our blog posts tend to start at 1,500 at a minimum.

Bold important words or phrases.

To help your smaller paragraphs stand out even more, bold some of the more important keywords within so your website visitors can further skim your pages.

Include keywords.

You want your landing pages to rank in Google, right? This means you need to optimize your copy for search.

Include important keywords within your copy, and try to focus on a single main keyword for each landing page to better ensure you rank for that keyword.

Create calls-to-action.

Our last tip is to make sure that you include calls-to-action all throughout your landing pages to help maximize your conversions.

Include buttons in every other section or add a floating button to the bottom of your page to get users to sign up, learn more, get a demo or whatever action you’re trying to get visitors to take.

Step 7: Design Your Website Graphics

Now it’s the fun part! Remember how I said that you need to include graphics and other visuals to go alongside your text? This is the perfect way to really draw users in and get them interested in your business.

And if you offer products, be sure to create stunning product graphics to help them stand out and grab attention.

You’ll want to make sure you design a logo to add to your website as well.

Still having doubt about creating a website? Text or call us now 017-7249716 (Jerome)