In simple words web design means making a sketch or layout of a webpage or website and then building it using some web design tool so that the webpage or website can be visible on the internet. Web designing has gone through a sea change since the early days and we have state of the art web design tools at our disposal. But for a beginner the basic concerns regarding web design remain the same. Some of them are –
- Where to start?
- What tools do I need?
- How long will it take?
- How much it would cost?
The first thing I did as a beginner was to do some research. All information about web design is available online and it's good to know the web design jargon before starting to build a webpage. Start with a simple webpage and slowly graduate to more complex ones before planning and executing a complete website. A simple webpage consist of code written in HTML and it's good to start by learning the basic tags and building a simple static webpage.
Now for me the next three questions are relative and the answers vary depending on individual user requirements and interests. There are varieties of tools available providing rich features to customize and build state of the art websites. As a beginner the basic tool to start with is an HTML editor. There are editors available that are called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. Using them does not require any web design experience. Alternatively you can learn the basic HTML tags and hand code a webpage from the scratch with the help of a notepad and saving it as HTML. There are powerful tools available that would allow you build a webpage without knowing details of HTML but it's good to start from the scratch and then move on.
So depending on the size and complexity of what you are interested to learn or build will depend on how much time it will take. If your website is a simple static website with few pages then you might do it in few days, and if you require advanced features with dynamic content then it might take weeks or months. Fortunately there is a range of open source web design tools available for free that will help you get started at no cost.
Once you build the set of pages that constitute your website you want to host it so that it can be seen by people over the internet. To do this you can look for a web hosting site that can give you web space to store your pages. Fortunately there are lots of Web hosting services available for free which as a beginner you can use rather than paying for a professional service. So get started as basic web design is relatively simple and can be learned by anyone.
