Small businesses do not usually have the budget to splurge on marketing and creating expensive visuals for brand promotion. So, they would prefer building a website design for their business on their own rather than hiring the services of a professional for the job. Today, when plenty of graphic design tutorials and logo makers are available free, to learn the art of designing a website is not a daunting task anymore for business owners.
Small business owners, especially when it comes to website building, are usually short on budget. They don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on professional website construction.
Notwithstanding this, websites are incredibly relevant in this day and age due to the growing number of Internet users. If they’re searching for a business or want to investigate a company they ‘re driving by every day, having a web site always costs a lot of money. This is unless those small business owners have mastered and managed to do the art of website design themselves.
Hiring a web design expert often falls beyond your budget.
Below are some of the website’s ways to get one
- Practice Perfect
You’ve heard, no doubt, the adage that “practice makes good.” That’s definitely true here. You a small business owner ought to keep on learning when it comes to website design. The stronger you ‘re going to be, the more you play with templates, choices, including headings and footers etc. Your website should feel like state-of-the-art before you know it, while still being something that you did yourself.
In top of that, if you’re concerned about messing with your live site and potentially making it look odd to anybody who might come across it, then you can always make a replica of your website and make the improvements to it. This way you can put everything on your live site once you have it looking the way you want it to.
In fact you should be able to do so with ease once your skills are sufficiently advanced.
- Take a lesson
There are plenty of free online courses for designing websites. You just have to know where to get them to look. Do a fast search or go straight to Udemy for “website design courses.”
This website offers many free courses, many of which are as easy as watching a video and getting a short exercise completed. While there’s nothing like learning to learn how to do things, you ‘re going to pick up some ideas to make it all easier. So what you had to do has been to spend some time studying.
If you’re really serious about learning web design, of course, you can skip the free courses and pay to take a number of them. Your local college may have plenty of web design courses to choose from, and you won’t have to spend much money on them.
Plus, if you tell the admissions office you only want to take a couple of classes, they ‘re more than certainly not going to make you go through the entire cycle of registration. If you’re not aiming for a degree, you should be able to pay for those web design courses in person, and then pass on once you’ve done.
Lessening new skills never hurts.
- Logically map the site out
Notwithstanding its name, web design is more about navigation than architecture.
That means you need to arrange your website in a way that makes sense. Spend some time sketching your map of the site. Which pages are to be nestled below other pages? How many calls to action are on the site? (We ‘re going to explain that in a minute.) How do people get around your site to find the information they need? All such questions need to be answered precisely even if you’re designing your social media page.
Yeah, with its looks, you can make the site beautiful and attract people, but if it’s not easy to navigate, then no one will waste any time walking around. You need to make as available as possible all the knowledge you need. Anyway, you’re going to create your website, and spend the whole time designing it for nothing.
If you’re not sure how to design your website, go to some of the websites of your competitor. Why did they work things out?
Beyond that, you can look at the website from a visitor ‘s eyes. If you were to go to the platform first, what would you like to see? Where can you find that information? Answering these questions will go a long way to help you.
Alternatively, you can also check out some of the UX inspection tools that help enhance the design of your app.
- Terminology Know
This goes back to the educational side of things, but you won’t need to take a web design course to brush up on the terms associated with it. There are some words that a professional graphic designer uses, and you should learn about them, like a call-to – action, which is what encourages the user to do something on your site, like contacting you for more information.
Many terms include items like a focal point, where the eye focuses on the screen first. Responsiveness refers to whether the website is designed for smaller devices like smartphones or not.
Most web platforms (such as WordPress) can do this for you automatically, but you need to make sure your site is set up in that way.
Material is yet another fantastic one. All you put on the website is a part of the material, from the text to the photographs. You need to have strong material to talk of that.
- Concentration on the material, not the concept
If you want to look stunning in your web page design, you need to concentrate more on its content than on its design. If you have good content, the majority of people will forgive your site for an outdated design. (With that said, the two are in the best balance.) So long as you can express what your company does in terms that are easy to understand and have some excellent non-stock images, people will be impressed by your content. There are, of course, some websites out there that have outdated designs, but if you look at their content, the work is solid enough.
When search engines crawl your web, they look for your content anyway, so you should always concentrate on producing path-breaking content, rather than on the overall design, at least before your skills are improved.
- Treat every page as if it’s a landing page
While you were learning your web design technology, the concept of a landing page was more than likely met. Those are pages meant to be, well, landed on, and hence their names. They expect to see a lot of useful information when someone goes to them, including calls-to – action and other specifics.
Although some sites have landing pages that are simply not connected to any other, these pages can be nestled into a menu as well. For your website you must view every single page as if it were a landing page. What do you mean by that?
Well, each page needs a call-to – action and plenty of information about it, even if it’s a nested page. Make sure every page has the logo design of your company prominently on top. First, the viewers can see the logo which ensures they are on the right page.
Creating subpages which lack these critical pieces of design is too simple. Why is that really so important? Not all the search engines are rational. For certain instances, instead of the main homepage, they will direct the user to a subpage. When the subpages are not well set up, then the users who go straight to them will be turned away.
- Use WordPress as your Platform for Hosting
Formerly recognized as a blogging website, WordPress. In those early days a great deal has changed.
Today, WordPress is a great website host in its own right, and it helps users to change the features of the website without learning many tips and tricks. Not everybody can master the use of Cascading Style Sheets (also known as CSS) JavaScript, but they can certainly learn how plugins work, how to upload and add photos to a site, and how to arrange the information in sidebars.
WordPress lets you be your own webmaster easily. Although other sites, including Wix, are just as easy to use, WordPress appears to be the master of that domain. If you’re hosting your site through them, or supplying companies that fund WordPress with other web hosting, updating it will be equally simple and you’ll be able to take all the tricks you’ve learned while taking web courses and translate them into reality.
However, adding new pages, creating a blog and more is as simple as clicking a button. It is perfect for small business owners who, while juggling, maintaining their websites and running their companies, do not have much time to spare.
As you can see, small business owners can do several things to master the art of website design. Once you’ve learned how to use your hosting platform (hopefully it’s WordPress), and are able to update your content to include critical information, then all will go much smoother.
You might even see an exponential increase in the amount of your business since customers near you will be happy to hire a company with such a useful website. This is the whole point of making one; right? You want to increase your company and your exposure.
