Introduction to Website Design

This website provides an introduction to website design. It is intended for people who are:

• Designing your own website. Website design used to be a very technical activity, requiring as a minimum HTML programming language plus some knowledge of servers and control panels, possibly PHP and mySQL. However, a number of smart software packages are now available which allows someone without this specialized knowledge to create their own website within a day. In fact, many packages claim that a novice can have a website running in less than a day. If you are designing and implementing your own website, we hope that the articles on this site will help you with the associated design decisions.

• Hiring a website designer. Even if you are hiring a professional design team to develop and maintain your website, an understanding of website design basics can be helpful. To begin with, a professional designer will often want to discuss with the client various design alternatives; an understanding of the basics of websites will aid this discussion. Secondly, there is no 'best way' to design a website and in many cases the design is affected by the nature of the target market. As the business professional, you need to apply your knowledge of the market and your clients to the design decisions, a task that is almost impossible if you don't even know what the design decisions are. We hope this site will help.

• Enhancing their design knowledge. Much of the information on this site is written for the novice. However, some of the more advanced topics such as SEO and website marketing may have a few items of interest even for the more experienced website designer.

How to make a website

Making a website has a number of key elements, which are discussed in detail in the articles listed in the menu above. In brief, these are:

• Site Name (domain name). Every site has a name (for example, this site is astraconsultants.com), which is properly known as a Domain Name. The choice of name is very important as it affects client perception, search engine position and the probability of users clicking on your site.

• Content. The text and other information provided on a website is known as the "content". For example, the text you are reading now is "content". If you are selling products (or services, or property), the list and descriptions of these is also known as "content". This is of course the heart of the website. In addition to describing what you do and selling your products and services, content can be used to improve your search engine position.

• Server Space. Your content needs to be stored somewhere on the internet, so that people using the internet can see it and your website. Just as your personal computer has disk drives where information is stored, there are also special disk drives (known as servers) where your website content is stored. For more information, click on Servers.

• SEO. When one uses a search engine to search for a topic, for almost every topic one gets a list of thousands (or more) different websites. If you are near the top of this list (for example, in the top 5) you are likely to get substantial traffic to your site from the search engines. However, lower down one gets little to no traffic from the search engines. Consequently, if you are selling a product or service, you will almost certainly want to be near the top. There are various things you can do to achieve this, which are collectively known as Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short).