Designing your website

Every website is different. That is because the needs of each company or individual are different. As you design your website, make sure you include all your needs. A few things to remember when designing your website are:
1 – Visual Layout – How you want your site to look
2 – Functionality – How to make your site do the job it is designed for
3 – Expand-ability – As your needs grow, make sure your site can grow with you.

Visual layout

Make sure you know how you want your site to look. Use a paper and pencil and draw out pages if needed. The exact look is not super important, but at least an idea, so during the coding process, you will be able to set the text areas correctly.
Remember that close to 60% of all transactions on the web are done using a phone. Make sure your site looks well in multiple platforms so that your viewers can see your content with their device. The CMS platforms dynamically modify the view for each device.

Functionality
Most websites are set up with a purpose in mind. What exactly do you want your website to do, Some of the popular things to have a website do are
Web Mail Portals
Online Stores
Photo Albums
Data Collection
Blogs
and the list goes on and on…
Whatever your need, you will need to acquire the software needed to perform the function needed. This is where you can spend a lot of money if you are not careful. There are a lot of modules available and depending on the core code for your site, they can be relatively easy to set up.

The more complex your site design is, the more coding will be necessary to make it all work. Again, this is why most people use a CMS platform

If you choose to use a Content Management System (CMS), a lot of the design can be handled using templates. The most popular CMS programs out there are WordPress (https://wordpress.org/)and Joomla (https://www.joomla.org/). They are both very well supported. There are other CMS platforms out there.

Expand-ability
You will want your site to be able to expand as your needs expand, so make sure your code allows that. The CMS platforms have this built in, which makes things nice.

For more information on Content Management Systems, see out blog article on CMS Platforms