How To Design a Website: A 7-Step Guide for Beginners

Fonts are like the kids, a variation of a typeface with a certain weight, or size. For example, Arial is a typeface while Arial Black (a bold, heavier version) is a font. In this post, we’ll go over how to design a website step-by-step. From defining your website scope to launching and scaling, we’ll cover it all. Get our guide to writing website copy or let Squarespace AI do the drafting for you. Free, online sessions where you’ll learn the basics and refine your Squarespace skills.

Use the homepage to guide visitors toward your key products and offerings. Many themes include various layout options, supporting even deeper levels of customization. The fit between your theme and website content doesn’t need to be perfect—you can edit colors and elements later on. But try to find a broad match when considering factors such as your brand, industry, and product catalog size.

How To Create a Website in 9 Steps (

Squarespace’s all-in-one website building platform gives you everything you need to create a compelling, effective online presence. You can start your new website with a single landing page, or build a complex, multi-faceted presence with media and ecommerce, and everything in between. Using elements, such as the following will structure your website, making it easy to navigate. And, don’t forget to spread the word by sharing your new website with your network. We recommend building some buzz across social media before revealing your beautiful website to the world. Your website’s tone of voice needs to align with your business and website goals.

Beyond these page types, aim to create pages that generate customer trust, such as blog posts, buyer’s guides, and independent reviews. Whatever pages and posts you add to your site, keep content relevant to your industry and niche. This begins the process of building authority within your area of expertise. As you upload content and visitors interact with your website, Google will place your website pages within its directory. The Shopify Theme Store contains more than 100 paid and free themes, each with distinctive styles and features.

Pick your preferred website builder

All Squarespace sites on an annual billing plan include a custom free domain. The first step to choosing images for your website is to identify what types of imagery fit your brand. Once you figure out the aesthetic that represents your brand, you can source the photos and images that will bring it to life. The goal is to create a polished representation of your brand, so the experience visitors have on your website encourages more trust, interest, and engagement for your website. Before you even start to think about your website design, sit down and do some brainstorming. Look at other websites in a similar space to yours and then think about the purpose of your website.

Then, think about the entire user experience and visual presentation of your website — from the top of the page, through the headers, and all the way down to the footer. Your design needs to engage site visitors right away, and keep them happy with an intuitive navigation, fast loading time, and logical layout. When it’s done well, navigation UX (user experience) is intuitive. Ideally, visitors will have such an easy time finding what they need that they won’t even think about the navigation design of your website. You don’t need coding or web development experience to customize a website template to your brand’s needs. But if you have some coding experience, you can add custom CSS code to add extra features to your web design.

Do I need to have a domain name to create a website?

Designing can be tricky, but thanks to website builders with customizable templates and elements, it’s pretty straightforward to design your dream website. However, deciding whether to hire a professional website designer or design one yourself depends on your budget, skill and website requirements. You’ve got a clear vision, you’ve established your brand identity, you’ve chosen a template, added pages, and optimized your content. It’s finally time to check everything’s in working order before you publish your site. We recommend choosing one dominant color, with two or three secondary colors to complete the palette.

From branding to shipping, we’ll walk you through the ecommerce website development process and explain what it takes to set up your own online business. You don’t want the first time anyone sees your website to be launch day. Once you’ve got how to design a website a draft version of your site, ask friends and peers to test out the user experience. While it can function as both a static and dynamic CMS, you’ll have to purchase WordPress themes and pay for WordPress plugins to get that functionality.

Paid Content Block

The reason creating a site map is such an essential step is so that you don’t go in blindly and not have a full idea of what your website will cover. The next thing you need to know about WordPress websites is that you’ll have to purchase a separate WordPress theme. Purchase a paid Site plan to publish, host, and unlock additional features. For those who learn by having a more practical origin to build upon, using a template could be a more viable starting point.

Whether you use product-sourcing apps or make your own products, you can build a website to sell your products online and in-store. Shopify offers various sales channels, apps, POS, and features that simplify the selling process. This includes the imagery you use on your website as well as brand assets for social media, advertising, etc.

Drive traffic that converts

Then, drag, drop, and copy-paste pre-built block patterns on any post or page with the built-in block editor. And make it even more unique by customizing your fonts and color palette. Creating and customizing your site is simple, and you control every element of the page.

Let’s start with the first thing you’ll have to take care of if you choose to create a WordPress website, and that’s your website hosting. Yes, you can create a robust and completely unique website with WordPress page builders. But it also requires you to get your own hosting plan, purchase and upload your theme, and fully build your website from the ground up – unless you hire a WordPress developer. Easily the most popular website platform, 20% of self-hosted websites are powered by WordPress. You can add elements like CTA buttons, text blocks, forms, and images by simply dragging and dropping them on the editor, no coding skills needed. If the business name you’ve chosen isn’t available, you might want to look into changing it unless you’ve already started to establish your presence.

They also come with business tools, like shipping services and online checkout, and marketing features, such as search engine optimization (SEO). Once you note why you’re building a website, you can check out web builders. These do-it-yourself (DIY) tools will help you to make a website yourself, even when you don’t know any line of code. And there are those designed for specific purposes, such as e-commerce, blogs and portfolios.

• This is why it’s a good idea to choose a basic .com website, however you can still work with other domain extensions.
• To source for and customize texts, shapes, colors and images needed for designing the sections and pages of your website, you’ll need certain apps and tools.
• You’ve got a clear vision, you’ve established your brand identity, you’ve chosen a template, added pages, and optimized your content.
• If this is the case, you can start to look into different domain extensions.
• So no matter where your visitors come from, your site will load fast.