A plan to design and build a website.
Building a website which meets your goals requires a few steps. Each will need to be tailored to suit your purposes and budget. The first step is consultation which will provide me with the necessary information to develop a plan for your site.
Wrapped around that plan will be the need for your site to:-
- look great & work well across all devices
- be easy to use, maintain & update
- be secure and fast
- be found easily by search engines
Monomeath Web Solutions facilitates this process.
Designing a Website
Photoshop can be great for this, and there are a multitude of other tools to produce wire frames etc. However, I often find the best tool is simply a pencil, and conversation. Together, we can produce a preliminary layout of your design.
Depending on the scope of your requirements and budget this very important stage of the project could require specialists in UX (User experience design) and UI (User Interface design).
If required I can engage some of the best in the business for this work. However, as a freelance website builder, I can provide the experience and knowledge required for many projects.
A quick analogy for UX & UI
Cattle producers (often called cow-cockies in Australian vernacular) need cattle yards to work their cattle.
The overall user experience for our cow-cockie will be decided by how well the yards function & look (design), with the result measured by how well the cattle flow through the yards.
The yards are in fact the user interface (UI). Cattle could flow through the yards easily, but be constructed with old or 
poor materials. They could be built with the best materials using the best tools, but if the design is poor, the user experience (UX) will also be poor.
So, on the web, the User Experience design will combine with the User Interface design in a balanced way to produce sites that look great & work well across all devices.
Responsive Web Design
Today, your site can be accessed via devices with a multitude of different screen sizes, pixel densities, orientation and platforms (operating systems) combined with a choice of several different browsers.
It is essential that your website design works well across all these devices. An integral part of my workflow is ensuring that this is so.
Building a website
A website can be built using a variety of tools or coded by hand.
The first site I had anything to do with was coded by hand using html, css and a little php. After a couple of years of maintaining this site, we ported it to WordPress for ease of management. The site’s appearance was remarkably similar after the change.
Today, WordPress is my tool of choice for building & managing websites, with very occasional use of Dreamweaver.
A website can be built entirely within WordPress without any coding knowledge. However, getting the best out of WordPress requires experience & knowledge of its functions & structure.Getting the best out of WordPress requires experience & knowledge of its functions & structure.
Extending WordPress is achieved using software referred to as plugins & themes. Thousands of free or paid plugins and themes are available.
With my knowledge of html, css and php, I can extend and modify plugins & themes, or build plugins for specific tasks.
Ongoing study, reading to stay up to date, and having professional advice from one of the best WordPress guru’s/coders on hand, all helps enhance the knowledge necessary for a freelance website builder.
Some projects require that the theme and/or plugins for a WordPress site be produced completely from scratch, involving writing extensive, complex code. In those cases I find it more efficient to engage a web developer.
However, for a great many sites, it is my job to build within a smaller budget.
This requires the knowledge & experience to utilize & modify the best of free or professionally produced generic themes and plugins to my clients’ advantage.
Adapting the software to suit your particular needs personalizes the site, and produces the planned layout and features.
In the following post, read how to I build sites to be secure and easily found by search engines.
You can browse more information or, when you are ready, get in touch and we will get the ball rolling for your new site.
