How to Build a Website

Build a website, it will be easy they said LOL!

Building websites is really not that easy. As a matter of fact, it can be very intimidating an overwhelming for a beginner. So today in this article I’m going to share my strategies on how I tackle building a website for the first time.

My strategy consists of a very specific workflow. Let me explain, when I first start a project to build a website, I select the WordPress theme I think will get me closest to my end goal.

I like to use Enfold as my WordPress theme, and I wrote a guide on how to use Enfold that can be useful.

Inside of Enfold they offer many different demos that can be deployed for different types of websites. I go through these and select which demo orientates closest to the website I’m trying to build. I will then select this and deploy it so that the demo content is now on the entire website.

The next step is to reload the homepage so we can get a good idea of what we’re looking at with the site. Now comes the most important part of my strategy on how to build a website. What I do is look at the very top of the website and pick out one item that I want to customize.

This can be the site title, the logo, the favicon, etc. I will then go in and I will make that one specific change and then go and refresh the website and see if it looks good. If it looks good I will move on, if it needs to be adjusted I will switch it out and try something else.

Once that element is finished, I will move on to the next element right next to it and repeat the process. I continue to do this going from the top, down to the bottom in order of the elements. I never jump around and try to do multiple parts of the website at the same time, I always work from the top to the bottom.

I believe that these incremental gains that you can see as you’re creating the site will help motivate you and push you further along to finish it out. If you try to jump around a lot, it can become overwhelming and discouraging and you may never finish the project.

So once the whole home page has been gone over from top to bottom and every single last element has been customized to the perfect design you want, then it is time to move on to the next page.

For example, next would usually be the About page, go through and do the same thing, start at the very top and move all the way down to the bottom and make sure every single element is customized exactly how it should be.

This is how I do web design. It is calculated and controlled. I move through the project in a very specific manner that allows me to wrap my mind around the creative process.

Sometimes when we look at a whole work of art it’s hard to understand how the artist made it. I believe that through building websites, I have discovered that artists usually will take one little piece at a time and focus in on those little details and then work their way around the art piece in micro areas.

This seems to be a really good way to approach creating art, at least it works for me. Try out this technique when you go to build your next website!