a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
With a goal in mind, the next step is to draft a plan for what you want your website to be like. A blueprint is crucial for developing just about anything further.
Write a list of pages or topics you want for your site; then, if you've thought of a certain way you want it to look, draw it out! On paper or even in your computer's inbuilt paint software is fine.
If you know what your website will be about, you might want to prepare its exact content in advance. If you have an outline for your pages, there is nothing wrong with actually writing them first.
You can do this in a Word document or equivalent, but I suggest doing so in a text editor like Notepad. If you can get what you want to say across over text, with placeholders for any images you want, you're already set.
If you're following along and in the process of making a website, try opening a text editor and drafting the text that might appear in an "about" page. How would you describe yourself, without the visual elements of Strawpage or Carrd to help?
When you know how you want to present your pages, you might want to plan a "basic" layout for your website. Not all websites use the same page design on every page, but many do, and having a fallback is always convenient.
Draw it out. Get creative! When you actually make the site, you can look at other websites for inspiration, find images that have good colour palletes for you to steal from, and so on. But if your base design cannot be expressed with simple shapes alone, you might want to revise your ideas.
Here, I have drafted a fake website using the simplest method available to me on the computer I wrote this guide on: Microsoft Paint.
This already conveys the basic information on what goes where, and even ideas of a graphic and some planned pages linked within the sidebar. The question is: how do you want your website to look?
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