There are a lot of websites and software out there which can assist you in creating your own professional looking website. If you think that web design is something that you may like to explore then where better to start than by having a go at your own website. Creating your own site and working with the advanced templates can, of course, work out for you.

However, web design is deep. It’s easy to make a visually pleasing site slow, terrible with search engines and just plain hard to navigate. Without experience, you’ll never know what went wrong along the way. A site that looks great on a computer could look awful on a phone or tablet, meaning that you could be missing out on up to 50% of all traffic. It is also likely that a site, which looks really cool to you, may look very unprofessional to the majority of users.

Never the less, you have to start somewhere. So if you think web design is something you would like to learn and get in to then building your own site is a brilliant place to begin. Then you can learn more on the subject and improve your site or start again, then take a class and use what you have learned and so on until you get really good; But if you don’t want to spend the time mastering your craft to build an acceptable website then you may just want to call us.

Here are some issues you are likely to encounter when creating your own website.

 

Time

The web changes all the time. If you are creating a website for yourself you will regularly need to keep reading, learning and redesigning your site as you learn to assure that your website is as effective and up to date as possible. It’s all about marketing. Ask yourself, what will sell your product or service more effectively, a professionally produced full-colour brochure or a flyer you have created on your laptop then printed off on your A4 printer?

 

Browser compatibility

The site you make from a template, or with inexpensive software, may look great when you view it on your computer, but you may be in for a surprise when you view it on your friend’s IPad.

That’s actually one of the trickiest things about web design. Different devices, operating systems, browsers and browser versions all display sites in slightly different ways. What looks great on a Windows machine running Internet Explorer may not work at all on a handheld device. Professional designers have a variety of operating systems/browser combinations running on several computers so they can check their work.

 

Search engine performance

Over the year’s professional web designers have learned how to code a site to optimise it for search engine functionality and even more time keeping it up with the constant changes to search engine algorithms.

Look at the web as a big library, with a billion books on millions of shelves. When you want to find a book on say, painters of the 17th century, you don’t just start walking around reading all the titles. You look up the location of the book first, so you can walk right to it. Professional designers know the tricks to make it possible for a user to actually find your site among the millions of other sites out there.

 

Navigation

Easy site navigation is key in today’s world of web design. People expect menus and links to be in certain places. They expect websites to share an organised structure and have expectations of where they will find certain key components.

This information isn’t a rule or instruction for web designers but they learn this by visiting hundreds of sites over the years. Full-time web designers look at sites that feel intuitive and try hard to understand what they do. Designers look at sites that don’t work and try hard to figure out the problems.

 

Boring

The thing that will bring people back to a site and keep them interested is if your site is unique. This means interactive elements, creative graphics, and unexpected elements. When you are learning, when you are doing your first site, it’s hard enough to get the very basic elements of your site to look and function correctly, let alone make them creative, unexpected or interactive.

A large part of web design is graphic design. This is the artistic side of web design. Most people don’t really know how to make something look appealing and interesting. That’s why web designers spend a lot of their time learning graphic design skills and concepts or in our case working closely with graphic designers to build the most aesthetically and yet functional sites to our customers.

 

 

So, if you believe you have what it takes to build your own site, go for it. However, if you want a professional site built by a bespoke company, who are up to date with trends and have the capability and knowledge to build effective and innovative websites then come to Angle Studios.