Website design as a hobby

Website design as a hobby

Website design is a very fantastic and cheap hobby that can develop into a career. Learning to setup a website can be done quickly with just a laptop and some free software.

There are numerous free templates as well as templates that are available for purchase or for free that allow one to alter, tweak, and build off of them. The world of website design has continued to evolve and change through the years and as it has done so, especially with the advent of Web 2.0, it has become both much simpler, but also more versatile than ever before.

All you need is a web address (a domain) and a hosting company and from there, it’s strictly a matter of figuring out what kind of design you want, the purpose of the website, and determining how much you want to spend, if anything on your new website.

Website designs can range from basic to visually intensive, from personal to business based, complete with shopping carts and checkout features.

If you have heard about blogging and blogs, such as Wordpress or Blogger, these blogging platforms are very versatile and give the most novice individual access to a number of templates and tools to design and grow their own website.

Basics of Web Design

The first thing that you should do when designing your first website is to use a sheet of paper, or a notepad, and lay out a plan for your website.

Websites across the World Wide Web vary greatly from one to another. There is no right or wrong format of template to use. Yet every single website has a landing page. This is usually, but not always, the home page. The home page, or landing page, is the first page that potential visitors will see when they type in your website’s url.

What is a url?

The url is the web address that a person types in to find your website. Google, for instance, is a url. Think of the url as your home or business’s address. Every website that is launched does need a url for others to find it.

There are a number of programs, such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, that allow you to build your website offline, using the files on your computer as the home base. This website design will allow you to click on and open new windows, as long as you have created the files for them. But what point is it in building a website that you’re not planning on launching for people on the Internet to find? There’s not much point, actually.

Before you start designing your website, go to a domain registry, such as GoDaddy to find a web domain address. The name you choose should have something to do with your business and the shorter and easier it is to remember, the more success you will have with it. If you are building your first website for your thoughts, then your name could be a good url. Many urls have already been taken, but these registry companies will often suggest other potential urls for you to use.

There are some that you can find that are free. You can also go to a blogging platform, such as Wordpress or Blogger, and get a url for free, though it will always be preceded by the company’s name before your own.

Web design layout

It’s time to figure out how many pages you want your website to have. Most website basics have the following:
• Home page

• About Us/Me page

• Contact Us/Me page

You mat have more pages and offer more information if you design this website for a potential business that you want to operate. So, figure out what pages you will want to have for your website. Try to keep it simple, however, since you’re new to the design aspect.

Once you have your pages figure out (limit them to seven in the beginning), then you’re ready to start developing the content layout.

Layout

If you are going to use a blogging platform, then it’s a good idea to lay out what you want on paper. The reasons for this are simple: if you know what you want, then it will be easier to spot when you come across it.

If you don’t know what you want, then you are going to be throwing darts in the dark, so to speak, and you might find a template that looks cool, but is not going to work for you in the long run.

Start with your home page. Visit a number of websites and get a feel for what inspires you to want to know more about the person or business. Figure out what kind of layout appeals to you the most. Use these sites as references for your own design and begin to structure your basic website along those lines.

Every home page should have a menu of the other sub-pages that is easy to see and simple to find. These links to your other pages could run across the top, on the left side, or occasionally on the right side. They should never be along the bottom unless you don’t want people to find them.

The average Internet user will notice the upper left corner of the page first. This is usually where logos or a single photo is placed. It’s also generally where the website name is located.

At the bottom right of the page is generally what’s known as a ‘call to action.’ This is like a ‘Buy It Now’ feature that entices people to know more or contact you. Everything else in between can either be missed or ignored, but if you have those two elements in place, then your website design will be effective.

Home pages are constantly overloaded with content. Sub-pages are where you want to put the meat and potatoes of your website. These can actually be of any length, really, but you do want to remember that the longer the page, the more important layout will be for your visitors.

Imagine visiting a website that has pages and pages of text without any breaks in it, no paragraphs, no bullet points, no images or graphics. It’s like reading a very dull and overly boring book and you won’t capture much attention. For a large amount of text, unless you are writing stories, keep the layout pleasing to the eye.

Images and videos are a great asset for almost any website, but the more than you have on your website, the slower the website will load. Use images that are small in file size, user-friendly for the web, and link to videos such as Youtube.

When you begin designing websites, you need to focus on load times for your web pages. Load times are measures of how long the page will take to open based on different connection speeds. While most of the first-world countries now seem to have high-speed Internet connections these days, that’s not always the case; millions of people still connect using dial-up services.

If you are planning on attracting people to your website, then the slower it loads the more likely it will be that they give up and move onto another site. When you add too many images or images and graphics that are large files, you slow down the load time for the website. Limit these and try to keep your load times to below two seconds for higher speed access.

Once you have the design aspect down and are working on improving your skills, the next thing you will want to do is focus on search engine optimization, or SEO for short.
Search engines are the most common and popular way that Internet users find websites and in order to most high enough on the rankings, you need to add appropriate keywords to your website’s content. For more information on SEO, simply search the term in any search engine and you will find a host of information to improve your website’s search engine ranking.

With the advent of some amazing programs, as well as a host of templates that exist on the web for free use, or even low-cost use, anyone can be able to design their own website, either as a hobby or a future profession. There is a number of free hosting plans that exist, as well as some very basic and free web design programs that anyone can use. There are some basic stipulations for their use, though, such as allowing advertising on the site in inconspicuous places, but if you are under a tight budget, these options are great.

The web designer can make much money

Website design is much easier and more practical for just about anyone to do. It is a great way for creatively minded people to stretch themselves and discover their inner genius. Ultimately, with so many free templates that exist and a variety of design and programming options, there is basically no limit to the type, style, or function that a person can tackle when it comes to website design.

If you have the desire to start designing your own website, whether for fun or for profit, there are plenty of resources at your disposal to create some awe-inspiring and wonderful websites.

Write Tutorials For Photoshop Websites

There are loads of web design tutorial sites online, such as PsdTuts. They pay greatly for brilliant tutorials. PsdTuts pay $150 per tutorial they accept, so what are you waiting for, get writing!

Freelance Switch & Smashing Magazine’s Job Board

People always need design work doing. There are loads of people who post work on job boards such as FreeLance Switch or Smashing Magazine. This can be a great way to pick up work.

Bring Offline Businesses Online

This can be an awesome way to earn alot of cash. Web Designers can get in contact with offline businesses, and offer them a fee to bring their business online. It is a great way for web designers to earn more money, and also it will help the business out and gain exposure within search engines.

Create And Promote Your Online Portfolio

Creating an online portfolio of your work generates buzz and can rank you higher for certain keywords in search engines. Blogs can publish your work, which will send traffic to your portfolio. People who like your work will hire you.

 Elance

This is the mother of all online places to find work. Looking at elance.com, it looks as if there are around 1,000 new jobs posted every day for web designers to feast upon.

Work ranges from HTML, CSS down to SEO and flash. I would seriously recommend checking out elance.com to make some money.

Offer Training / Write How-To’s

There are many websites such as tutor.com, ehow.com and videojug.com that pay you to make how-to videos / articles, and tutor people about a certain subject, such as web design in our case.

Become An Expert In A Niche

If you market yourself to a certain niche then you will receive alot more clients. An example of this would be you could be a general web designer, but you could have a few business cards in the golfing niche that say we specialize in web design for golfing, and you can repeat this for many different niches.

Participate On Web Marketplaces

Web Marketplaces such as sitepoint and digitalpoint forums can earn you alot of money. It can spread your name out there, and get you alot of work. If you participate in discussions and show off your design skills, you will find yourself with lots of design work.

Affiliate Marketing

An example of affiliate marketing would be, if you have just finished designing a website for a client, you could recommend or even offer to help them setup hosting to host the website. If they agree then you can sign them up to web hosting companies using your affiliate link. Such as DreamHost. Then you would receive a certain % of what the client is paying each month for referring them to that web host.

Design Themes For ThemeForest

With ThemeForest, you can design themes for popular content managment systems such as wordpress and joomla, and ThemeForest will sell your theme and give you a commission.

Offer The “All In One” Package

Clients can be lazy, and sometimes they look for web designers that offer the “All In One” package. This means that you do the web design, coding / programming and host their website for them / setup their web hosting. If you can’t program, then you can always outsource or hire a programmer to complete the work.