a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
There are many ways to format a website, and many ways to think about making one. Choosing one way, at least at the start, is a good way to get an idea of what you want to do and how you can lay things out.
First, when it comes to overall structure:
This is probably the simplest, and I actually recommend it to people starting for the first time. If you have just one thing to say, try saying it well. If you have several things to say, organise them one after another.
I will present you with the simplest example I could come up with: a microblog a la Twitter, all on one page, with barely any styling.
Of course, your page can look prettier than this. It can have whatever information you want on it, too.
You might choose to have a base homepage and a design with a consistent sidebar or navigation section, leading to various pages. This is very very common, and for good reason.
I believe the only restriction with this kind of website is how many links you can fit into the layout, or how creative you can get with styling the base structure.
This might be a bit intimidating, but if you know what you want to achieve, it is a very fun way to format your website. Your homepage might have links to topic pages, which have links to subpages, which might even have links to related pages inside of them.
The general idea is to have one base page, and have each page relate to the last, while not being easily linked site-wide. It can be intimidating to pull off, but very rewarding and logical.
Then there are many ways to format your website, visually:
Maybe you have very little or simple styling. A simple font, a very streamlined layout, and easy to read text.
What "minimalist" means to you might be different to another person, but at its core, there should not be much to distract a visitor.
I would say that oblaat's design is relatively minimal. The focus here is on the guide itself.
Most commonly expressed as one-column, two-column and three-column layouts. One-column layouts can also be minimalist, or whatever else you want to call them, but two-column and three-column layouts tend to take the form of one "main" section and one or more sidebars.
These are very easy to come across, and very easy to make. They are very navigable, too, which can be very important!
But how should your visitor move around?
Simply a navigation bar at the top of the page. You can't cram it full of links, of course, but it works for many websites. And if you want to cram it full of links, you're able to make dropdowns!
Maybe, on someone's website where they talk about the shows they watch, it reads something like: Home / About / Journal / Reviews / Links.
This is also a classic and a standard, for a reason. A sidebar is merely a list of links to the side of the main content.
The drawback with such a thing is that, if there are too many links, the sidebar gets long and difficult to navigate. However, this can be circumvented by means of dropdowns, collapsible lists, index pages full of links, or merely accepting that you will just have a thousand links on your pages.
Maybe—especially on a hub-and-spoke style website—you might want to hide some links, and reward visitors who read your content closely.
A page that offhandedly mentions traveling to a place might have a link to a gallery of photos from the trip, for example, that is not mentioned anywhere else. It can be very fun to look for and discover pages like this.
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