Web Design
One of the more difficult aspects of creating a website is actually designing it. Web design is not to be taken lightly—it is imperative that your website be visually appealing and easy to navigate. This doesn't bode well for the novice at programming languages or designing logos and graphics. While it is true that HTML/XHTML is easy to learn, an amateur just learning the language is unlikely to produce a well designed website. A What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) HTML editor such as the well regarded Dreamweaver will help significantly but there are also other methods available to aid you.
I would highly recommend visiting Open Source Web Design (OSWD) if you are struggling or incapable of creating your own web design from scratch. The amount of freely available web designs located at OSWD is astounding so you shouldn't have a problem finding one to base your website off of. For the novice at web design, this is an excellent route to take as it is far easier to modify an existing design template and you'll eventually learn a great deal of HTML/XHTML and CSS by playing around with the code to suit your needs.
Your website should render exactly the same in all popular web browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera) which can usually be ensured by using valid HTML/XHTML. The W3C validator can be used to check the validity of your web pages. To be realistic however, special circumstances may prevent 100% valid code. Whether you achieve 100% valid code or not, you must check your web design manually using all popular browsers as a quirk in one browser may make your website a jumbled mess and scare off visitors to your website who use that browser.
The actual HTML/XHTML code for your web design should be easy to understand/read as well. If you have to come back later to make a change it helps drastically when your source code is neatly organized, indented, and commented where appropriate. Doing this may be extra work at first but will save you a significant amount of time later on when changes must be made to your web pages. Server side includes can also be used to make maintaining your website a breeze.
Your web design should also follow this rule—keep it simple. The actual source code should not be bloated with unneeded code; use Cascading Style Sheets as much as possible to reduce the amount of code on your web pages. Javascript should also be external when possible as some javascript functions contribute thousands of lines of code that can easily be called from an external javascript file. This helps keep your source code easy to read and also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The simplicity rule extends to the actual look of your website too. Your visitors will be put off by a needlessly busy website with little whitespace. By maintaining a simple web design, your visitors will be more inclined to navigate through your website and read your articles. There are too many websites to count that are horribly designed and they are usually doomed to failure. By keeping it simple your web pages should load faster as well; something your visitors will appreciate.
But what about coming up with a nifty logo for your website? This is even trickier as it is much harder to produce a quality logo, especially for the individual with no experience working with graphics. If you fall under that category, you may have to opt for a simple text logo. Any attempt to create anything more extravagant may end up in heartbreak after many hours of failed attempts. Photoshop is the graphic editing software of choice for many professionals. Such pieces of software are difficult to fully master however. If you simply must have a professional looking logo for your website but can't create it yourself, we highly recommend RentACoder. It doesn't cost a penny to post your web design project and you'll receive bids from top notch professionals from around the world for you to choose from. The bang for your buck is truly maximized at RentACoder and we have worked with them extensively in the past and were always extremely satisfied with the work received.
As part of designing your website, we strongly encourage the use of server side includes and well thought out site navigation, which we discuss in separate articles.