Tips on Designing a Web

Designing a great website may seem like a daunting challenge, but as long as you keep the basics in mind, you will find the process interesting and enjoyable. There's more to it than just looking good! We'll show you the basics, and some general guidelines to help you design websites that keep people coming back.

To start design a website, you must mastered the CSS & it's tricky.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. You can read more about it, here.

Identify which content-management system (CMS) that you're gonna design for. There's many web CMS. This is the popular platform this time.

> Wordpress <

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content-management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on a web hosting service. Features include a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.

*You must mastered HTML, CSS & PHP to started design a templates for this CMS.

> Blogger <

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via custom URLs. Unlike Wordpress, Blogger cannot be installed in a web server. One has to use DNS facilities to redirect a blogspot domain to a custom URL.

*You must mastered HTML, CSS & XML to started design a templates for Blogger.

> Own CMS <

To build own CMS is not an easy jobs. You'll need a year to develop & design your own CMS and I don't recommend this to those who're just step into Designing career. To develop your own CMS, you can use either PHP platforms or ASP platforms and the important thing is you must make sure there's no " holes " on your CMS, to prevent " hackers " to stole your database or files. The advantages use your own CMS is, you can create a custom website. For an example, chatbox.

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Tips :

1. Don’t bombard the viewer with cutesy, gimmicky graphics. Flash animation, bright colors, patterned backgrounds, and music that auto-plays each time a page loads were fun to experiment with in the 90s but will send today’s web-users running. Stick with simple backgrounds that contrast with the text color for maximum readability.
2. Though you’re welcome to design the layout based on your own personal vision or things you’ve admired on other sites, it may be easier to purchase a ready made template.
3. To accommodate hearing and visually-impaired visitors, you can caption video, transcribe audio, and include a note about accessibility. Though tables can be an efficient way of organizing information, visually-impaired visitors who use a screen-reading program may not hear the material in column order.
4. To keep from wasting visitors’ ink, use a separate style sheet to format your site for printing.
5. Turn off background images when you set up the printing parameters.
6. Use black text on a white background.
7. Remove the menu bar and any unneeded images.
8. You can always use CSS to make suitable distances between paragraphs.

Warning :
Avoid plagiarism and observe all copyright laws. Don’t add random images from the web, or even structural elements without permission. Whatever you include on your website must be both legal and ethical.