Step 4a. Chose Website Design Software
There are many ways to design a web page. If you know how to program in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language - programming/source code for web pages) you can use a simple word processor (e.g., WordPad) and create a web page. You don't have to do that any more because there are so many web design software products available that create the HTML for you. Many web design products have a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. That means you can use word processing and graphic design methods to design a web page. The HTML is generated automatically and you never have to see it or know anything about HTML.
Some web design products are very basic and easy to use (and cheap - $50 or less) and work fine for creating all but the most complex web pages. If you want to create a very complex website (with product catalog, shopping cart, etc.) you will likely need one of the more sophisticated web design software products (over $100 and up to $1000s). Unless you have web design experience you will likely want to hire a professional web designer to create a complicated website. Most website hosting companies have free basic web design software you can use after you purchase one of their hosting packages but you are much better off with one of the inexpensive WYSIWYG products. Go to the Compare page to find out why I use Web Page Maker website design software.
After you have decided what software you are going to use you are ready to design your web pages.
Step 4b. Design the Website
After you have decided what software you are going to use you are ready to start creating pages for your website. While you are creating the web pages they can not be viewed from the Internet so you don't have to worry about making mistakes. After you have purchased a hosting package the web hosting company will automatically create a temporary home page for your website. You may want create and upload/publish your own home page that tells what the web site is going to be about and note that it is "Under Construction".
Templates (see FAQS) may be included in the design software that you can modify to suit your needs. You are usually better off to design your own template. To do this simply create a new page and design all of the basic items (header, page links, colors, graphics, etc.) that are going to be the same for most of the pages in your website. Save this basic page design with a suitable file name. Then open the template page for each of the different website pages and do a "save as" with the name of each different page. When this has been done you can close the template page and open each of the different pages and add/modify them to create all the different web pages. Be sure to include the website title and description (see FAQS) so you don't have to do that again for each page. The website home page should be saved as "index" if you want it to automatically appear as the home page.
Before you upload/publish your web pages it is a good idea to first save them as HTML files in a folder on your hard drive. That way you can test them to see what they will look like on the web and be sure all the links work correctly (go to the folder where they are saved and open the index.html file). Testing is especially important! Having links that don't work or go to the wrong place is one of the most common design errors. If your design software doesn't have a spell check function it is a good idea to type text in a word processor that does spell checking and then copy and paste the text into the web page.
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Design the Website
