Designing and building a website is often a task left to designers,
programmers and high priced software systems. In this article we will
show you that some of the best things on the web are truly free.
- 1Determine Your Niche. This is usually the easiest part of starting the website template search process. If your business is Accounting, you might choose a business template. If you are an artist, then maybe an artist's template. Whatever you decide, it's best to begin right here.
- 2Choose a Colour Scheme. Choosing your colour scheme is important as it will help brand your design to your hobby, product or service. If you are in health care, you might want to choose green as it is a "healthy" colour. Finding a good colour chart will certainly help and there are plenty online. If you have a logo for your business or your niche, what are the colours? It's best to stay within your colour scheme to make the site more palatable and congruent with your design.
- 3Consider The Pages You Want To Build. We know there will be one main page, usually titled "Home" or "Main". But there are other pages that you may need such as, "About Us", "Who We Are", "Our Products" and "Contact Us". Writing down the names of these pages will help in your choice of template as some only include a single page while other may include a number of inner pages.
- 4Think about what 'Your Copy' will be. Also known as "text"; your copy is what you have written about each page. Whether it's "About Us" or even a "Contact Us" page - each page needs its own "copy" to stand apart from the other pages. This will tie in to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO - more about this further down) of each page to aid search engines in locating your work to display for their users.
- 5Start searching. You have all of your information ready and can now search for the perfect template... but what search terms do you use? A good suggestion would be "free web template". Or, if your business was accounting, you would search for "free business templates" or "free accounting template". Keeping the search to no more than three words is preferable. The search engine you use will bring up the best links for your search term - but lets not forget there are a few more pages - it's best to inspect them all. Some new websites that offer great new templates might not be on page one, so it's best to do some due diligence to find great work. As well, some of the sites that come up on the first page typically have older designs on them. In our example, we'll visit WebTemplex.com[1] for free websites.
- 6Use the new design. You have now found your design and have downloaded it to your computer. A suggestion would be to create a new folder to store the site in and to work from. You would hate to have the website and all the files sitting in your documents folder scattered around with other files. It's best to keep everything together. Once you have the site file downloaded it will probably be in a zip file. A zip file contains all of the documents, images and code all compressed in a tidy file. You will need an unzip utility such as Jzip or Winzip to "unzip" the file and extract the files to your new folder.
- 7Unzip the Files. Quite simply you will double click on the file and the appropriate unzip software will load. This is based on your decision of unzip utility. It will open and show you the files it has within it. You can click on any number of files and drag them to your designated folder. They will instantly uncompress once placed. Remember to save this zip file in a safe place in case you need to get an image or other file from it.
- 8Start building the site. Files Unzipped - Now Let's Build - for some, this scares people. You can't really hurt or "mess up" a website. In fact, everything you do only enhances it from this point. The files you will be editing will normally have the following file extensions: .html, .htm, .php, .shtml. For simpler sake, let's believe you are using an .html file. You will need something to edit the files with. By editing we mean that you will be entering your "copy", phone numbers, address - etc - on to the page. You can use Windows Notepad to edit the file and it really does a simple job - although the backend may look scary... if you read through the lines while looking at an image of the site you can start to get a feel for what each line means. Especially when you see text placement. There are other commercial HTML Editors on the market and they all do pretty much the same job as Notepad, just a tad more expensive.
- 9Edit Your Pages. As stated in Step 8 above, you'll open the file in Notepad by first starting the Notepad programme. You'll then click on "File", and then "Open" and browse for the first file to edit. The very first file you will edit will be index.html. So, with the file open in Notepad, you will take your copy, or other info and place it into the blocks provided or where other text resides. The other text on a template site may seem like a strange language, "lorem ipsum..." this is simply garble language used on most templates. Finding the location of the spot to add your text, simply type in what you want it to say and save the file. You can always click on the .html file and your browser will open showing you what it looks like after you made any changes. If when you open your file it appears distorted, simply go back and undo the changes - this is a great learning experience!
- 10Do some Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While you are writing your copy into your files keep in mind that the copy must be different than the copy of the other pages. If all pages had the same copy on them, your site would not garner the attention it would normally get. Each page must stand alone like it was its own website. You'll also use what are called "Keywords" within your writing to describe the page as it matches the text. For instance, this page could use the keywords, "website template". If your business was accounting then you would certainly add in the keywords, "accounting", finances", "taxes" etc.
- 11Upload the files. Once you have all of the files the way you want them it's time to upload them to your host. This is often referred to as FTP'ing, or uploading. This is the process of taking all of the images and files and uploading them to your host. You will simply start your FTP programme and sign in to your web hosting account. Most FTP software allows you to transfer files much like transferring files in windows; where you select a file and drag and drop it into another folder. This new folder is actually the server where your domain is being hosted.
- 12Check Your Work - Once the website is uploaded, check each page to make sure you are not missing an image or that text is misspelled or missing.
