It’s been an interesting process, piecing together a new website. While I do this on a daily basis, I’m typically surrounded by a host of experts that I can rely on to do the ‘dirty’ work. Cropping images to size, implementing coding tags, writing engaging copy and the like.
This time, I decided to go it alone. No creatives. No techies. Only ourselves and the web at my fingertips. The experience has been rewarding and humbling at the same time. It has required time, patience and a willingness to try new ideas. I hope you like the end result!
For those who are interested, I’ve used WordPress as the back-end content management system. Whilst there are a number of similar offerings, I’ve found the interface easy to use and the themes simple to implement. A theme, for those who aren’t aware, is a pre-packaged look and feel for your site. Using themes saves you a huge amount of time in designing and developing all the code for a site, enabling the process of development to take days instead of months. I chose mine from ThemeForest.
Selecting the imagery took a lot longer. Whilst we have a litany of images at our fingertips, it was important to find things that matched our corporate values. Plus, we wanted to ensure that we had the rights to use them on a commercial basis. So no Google Images for us – we opted for iStockphoto. The site has a great range of images, the customisation facility is incredibly intuitive and the images were lower cost that some of the more mainstream providers like Getty.
The important thing to understand when selecting an image is how malleable it can be. One carefully-chosen image can produce four of five separate images for your website through selective cropping, cutting, slicing, de-focusing. The colours can be softened or changed to monochrome. In essence one image can go a long way.
To play around with images, you’ll need to use some form of editing tool. Most PCs have Paint pre-installed, but I find that you need something that has a few more features. Adobe Creative Suite is a favourite of the design industry but if your budget is tight, like ours, then you could opt for something like Paint.net. Take some time to read through the tutorials and familiarise yourself with how it works, but when you do, the results are great!
Getting icons is another massive task and is down to personal preference. Sites like iconfinder are helpful. Again, make sure that the icons you have selected have no commercial constraints.
Finally, you need a decent analytics engine. I’ve opted for Google Analytics. It’s free and pretty simple to use. It is worth taking time to set things up carefully from the onset and this is one area you may want to take some professional advice. From us perhaps!
And there you have it. How to design and develop a site in less than a week. I hope its been helpful. And if you’re interested in talking to us to find out more, we’re here to help!