Design Process To Help You Build Your Own Website
Building your own website is so fun and it makes you feel like a complete super star. You’ll be so excited once it’s live! Before that happens, though, you’ll need to y’know… build your website.
How, exactly, you will get your website built?
Building a website is more than just buying a domain. For me, it’s all about following my web design process. After years of learning web design and building websites, I’ve honed a web design process that works perfectly for me. When it comes to building websites, I find that I have to stay hyper-focused on one task at a time. Whenever I stray from my one task, I end up lost, overwhelmed, and frustrated.
If you’re about to build your own website, I hope to help you avoid that terrible mix of feeling lost, overwhelmed, and frustrated. Let me distill my web design process down for you:
Start by identifying your audience
List the content you need for your site
Write the content you need for your site
Build your site
Style your site
Let’s get into it!
1. Start by identifying your audience
I am a big fan of user-centered design, so this is always my starting point. Who is your audience? What are they looking for when they come to you? How old are they? Are they more likely to see your site on their phones or their laptops?
2. List the content you need for your site
The best way to capture your audience’s attention is by including the exact content they’re looking for. To figure out what content your audience needs to see, I’d recommend trying a User Chart Exercise. Here’s a blog post I wrote about my User Chart Exercise and how you can do it yourself.
3. Write the content you need for your site
After completing the User Chart Exercise you should have a clear list of pages you need on your site and key messaging for each page. This is the phase where I whip up a Google doc and start drafting content. In this phase I’d also gather a few images for my website. (I often rely on stock photos from Unsplash, especially for clients who don’t have high res photos of their work.)
4. Build your site
Once I’ve got the content I’ll need for the site, I start building it out. I try not to think about how it looks during this part of the process - I just want to get the site set up and loaded with content. The next step is to mess around and rearrange everything so it looks nice.
5. Style your site
Here’s the fun part - time to make it pretty! Go through your site and configure the layout of each section, adding images throughout the pages. You may also want to tweak your website fonts, colors, and design so your website matches your visual brand. This is also a good time to check the site on mobile view to make sure everything still looks beautiful for anyone looking on their phone.
If you’re looking to build your own website, stick to this web design process and tackle only one part of the project at a time. Good luck!
Stop putting random content on your About page!
Instead, write website content that fits the needs of your specific target audience. Sign up with your email and I’ll send over my User Chart Worksheet to guide your website content creation.
