Want to learn how to design your own website, using just your computer and a few simple tools? You’ve come to the right place!
Our step-by-step guide will teach you how to start your own design project, and it’s so easy that anyone can do it.
Table of Contents
How To Web Design Software
1. WordPress (Free and Paid)
Here at websitesetup.org, we recommend people use WordPress to create their websites.
Why?
Through our experience creating hundreds of sites, we’ve found that WordPress offers the best combination of flexibility, power, and ease-of-use necessary to build and launch content-based websites.
And it seems like the internet agrees with us! Over 35% of all websites run on WordPress. WordPress powers popular blogs, e-commerce stores, communities, and more.
To get started with WordPress, you have two options:
- Set up a self-hosted WordPress site (WordPress.org)
- Sign up for a free WordPress.com account
If you’re just looking to host a small personal site, WordPress.com may be a great choice. However, if you’re starting a more complex project a self-hosted WordPress site is probably a better option.
If you are already using WordPress, but looking for help creating a WordPress theme or customizing WordPress pages, we recommend checking out the Genesis Theme Framework and the Elementor Page Builder.
- How to Create a Website using WordPress (step-by-step)
- How to Create a Blog using WordPress (step-by-step)
2. Bootstrap (Free)
Originally created by the engineering team at Twitter, Bootstrap is now the world’s most popular framework for building responsive, mobile-first websites.
Put simply, Bootstrap is a free library of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that simplifies the process of coding a website from scratch. Bootstrap offers dozens of features like a grid system, responsive breakpoints, and a large library of components that make coding a website quick and easy.
The component library includes headers, navigation, buttons, forms, alerts, and more. The Bootstrap team has comprehensively documented each feature, complete with examples and suggestions for customization.
To get started with Bootstrap, simply download the latest version of the Bootstrap framework, copy one of the example templates, and start coding.
Visit GetBootstrap.comFurther Reading:
- How to Use Bootstrap (step-by-step)
3. Wix (Free and Paid)
Wix is an easy-to-use, affordable alternative to WordPress.
Much like WordPress, Wix can be used to create a variety of different sites, including blogs and stores. Through its drag-and-drop editor, Wix makes it simple to set up and launch your site in just a few minutes.
Wix is a fully-managed subscription service, meaning that the company handles all the details around hosting the site, backing it up, and handling security.
Wix offers a free, ad-sponsored plan that includes hundreds of templates and options to choose from. Paid plans start at $14 per month and include ad removal, increased bandwidth, and additional space for videos.
Visit Wix.comFurther Reading:
- How to Use Wix (step-by-step)
4. Dreamweaver (Free Trial)
Dreamweaver is Adobe’s application for coding, editing, and maintaining websites. It lets you edit websites both by coding them manually and through an intuitive visual interface.
Dreamweaver includes many of the features of a traditional, text-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like syntax-highlighting, automatic code completion, and the ability to collapse and expand sections of code. You can even use Dreamweaver with Bootstrap!
Unlike a traditional IDE, however, Dreamweaver’s visual interface is what makes it really stand out. Any changes you make in your website’s code are automatically displayed in real-time in Dreamweaver’s interface, and you can also point and click to edit your website’s code visually.
If you’d like more power than a simple drag-and-drop editor, but need something simpler than a code-only IDE, Dreamweaver is a fantastic option.
You can subscribe to Dreamweaver on its own for $20.99 per month or choose a subscription to Adobe’s full Creative Suite for $52.99 per month. Adobe offers 7-day free trials for both options, and discounts for students are frequently available.
Visit adobe.comFurther Reading:
- How to Use Dreamweaver (step-by-step)
5. Squarespace (Paid)
Squarespace is another good website builder that serves as a third alternative to Wix and WordPress.
Much like Wix, Squarespace offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating your website. Squarespace also offers a huge variety of different themes and color customizations and includes many of the standards you’d expect like SSL encryption and the ability to build an online store.
Squarespace’s personal plan starts at $14 per month with limits of 20 pages and two contributors. The business plan lifts these limitations and costs $23 per month.
Visit Squarespace.comFurther Reading:
- How to Use Squarespace (step-by-step)
Best Software for Interface Design & Prototyping
Interface design apps and prototyping tools help designers envision and communicate how websites will look and behave before they’re launched. Here are a few great candidates to consider.
6. Figma (Free and Paid)
Despite being one of the newest tools on this list, Figma is also one of the most powerful. If you’re looking for a feature-loaded tool for interface design and prototyping, Figma may be the perfect fit.
Much like Sketch, the next app on this list, Figma features an intuitive, vector-based interface that makes designing websites simple. Anything you can do with Sketch or Adobe XD, you can also do with Figma.
What makes Figma really shine, however, is its collaborative, cloud-based approach. With Figma, multiple team members can edit a design file simultaneously. Business stakeholders can also leave comments, and developers can copy code snippets to simplify the process of turning your design into a real site.
Figma offers a free plan that includes up to 3 projects. Paid plans start at $12 per month and include advanced options like custom user permissions.
Visit Figma.com
7. Sketch 3 (Free Trial)
Sketch is an extremely popular interface design tool focused on simplifying the process of creating beautiful, high-fidelity mockups. Sketch gained popularity in the early 2010s when it won a design award from Apple.
Designers love Sketch because its uncluttered and intuitive interface makes it easy to create beautiful designs quickly, without the steep learning curve often associated with other design tools. Sketch also has a comprehensive ecosystem of plugins and integrations that bring added power and make it simple to integrate Sketch into your workflow.
While Sketch has recently added some features focused on prototyping and collaboration, the program isn’t as advanced in these areas as some of the other tools on this list.
Sketch is available for macOS and costs $9 per editor, monthly (or $99 per editor, annually). Sketch comes with a 30-day trial.
Visit Sketch.com
8. Adobe XD (Free Trial)
Tired of being beaten out by simpler tools that were better-suited to interface design and prototyping, Adobe released XD in 2019 as its answer to the other tools on this list.
XD is a powerful, vector-based tool that also supports prototyping animations. If you like Adobe’s other products like Photoshop and Illustrator, chances are you’ll also like XD.
The program also supports opening and editing files from Sketch, making it a popular choice for Windows users who need to collaborate with other designers who use Sketch. That said, novices may find XD’s learning curve a bit steep, and even many professionals prefer other tools on this list.
You can subscribe to XD on its own for $9.99 per month or choose a subscription to Adobe’s full Creative Suite for $52.99 per month. Adobe offers 7-day free trials for both options.
Visit adobe.com/products/xd
9. InVision Studio (Free and Paid)
While InVision got its start offering a cloud-based prototype service that integrates with tools like Sketch and Photoshop, it now offers its own full-featured interface design and prototyping tool called Studio.
Think of InVision Studio like an advanced version of Sketch, complete with advanced motion animations, collaboration tools, and options to create and share prototypes.
InVision Studio is currently in free beta. To share prototypes using its cloud service, you can opt for a free plan or upgrade to one of InVision’s paid offerings, which allows for more collaborators and projects.
Visit InVisionapp.com
10. Framer X (Free Trial)
Framer originally started as a JavaScript library and toolset for prototyping, but it’s evolved into the most powerful tool on this list.
Framer X is a rapid prototyping tool that supports complex animations and generates the code for React components on the fly. At first glance, Framer’s vector-based interface looks extremely similar to Sketch, but there’s far more power under the hood.
Designers like Framer for its responsive design features, an array of premade components, and support for advanced animations. Developers love it because it simplifies the process of turning a design into production-ready code.
If you’re already part of the React ecosystem, or if you simply want a powerful interface capable of creating high-fidelity prototypes with realistic interactions and animations, Framer X is a fantastic option.
Framer X offers a free plan for up to two editors. Framer’s paid plans start from $20/month.
how to design my own website from scratch
1. Specify a goal for your website and list all your requirements
If you want to build a website from scratch, it’s best to start by figuring out what goal or purpose it should serve. In other words, what do you want to achieve with it?
Are you planning to sell products or services? Perhaps you want to show off your portfolio? Or maybe you’re building your website purely for branding purposes?
The answer to this question will help you determine:
- What types of pages you’ll want to publish (portfolio page, pricing page, about us page)
- The types of content you’ll want to feature on them (image gallery, articles, videos)
- As well as the technical capabilities you’ll want (such as integration with an email marketing platform or a live chat solution)
If you’re not 100% sure about this step, this guide tackles the big question – Why do I need a website?
And if you already know that you need a website, but aren’t sure what to base it on, then these profitable website ideas might come in handy.
Once you’ve figured that out, you can move on to the next step, like researching your market and competitors for example.
2. Research your market and competitors
With your goal and initial ideas in mind, it’s time to research your target audience and competitors.
What you want to find out is:
- What type of information your potential customers are interested in
- What types of content your competitors have been publishing to capture them
The best way to do it (although slightly time-consuming) is to manually go through competitors’ pages, social media groups, Q&A sites, and forums – and note down all relevant information like the topics addressed, questions asked, and types of content that you see.
To give you an idea of what this kind of research could lead to, imagine you’re a personal trainer. By checking out other personal trainers’ websites, you’ve noticed that all of them have these kinds of pages and content on their site:
- A services page where they describe their services and pricing plans
- An about page describing the trainer and their background
- A page with testimonials and transformations of the happy customers
- A blog with training tips and stories
- An email newsletter signup form offering a downloadable meal recipe plan
- Social media links leading to their YouTube and Instagram profiles
On top of that, on social media groups, you’ve noticed that your target audience frequently asks about personal trainers working in specific locations. Because of that, you also decide to add an extra page listing all the gyms where you provide your services.
It’s even super important to do your research even if you’re creating an informative-only directory such as a website for your local church. You should determine exactly what those members want to see, so you can plan your content accordingly.
Once you’ve finished your research, note down everything that you absolutely must include on your website, and move on to the next step.
3. Research what appeals to you visually
Now it’s time for some visual research to find some website design layouts you and your target audience would find visually appealing.
Just like the previous step, you’ll want to start by researching your competitors, going through various website template galleries, and Pinterest.
The important thing in this step is to remember the goal of your website and the target audience the page is meant to serve. These two factors should help you decide the direction and layout of your website (for example, you could be building a multi-page website or a one-page website).
While you can get some inspiration from them, you don’t want to spend too much time looking at websites from global companies if you’re running a small local business. Not only would such companies have different goals from yours, but they’d likely also have a larger budget and a whole team of designers and developers building the page for them.
Alright, let’s now move onto the slightly more technical step – selecting your website builder.
4. Choose your website builder
Let’s start by answering a question – do you really need a website builder to make a website?
In short, no.
If you have coding skills you can create a website from scratch using just a code editor and HTML, CSS, and JS libraries like Bootstrap. However, this approach requires a lot of time, skill, and experience.
You could also hire a web developer to build a website for you. Most likely, such a developer would customize one of the templates they’ve already worked with and set up the website for you using WordPress or another popular content management system (CMS).
This is a popular approach, especially if you’re planning on running a blog, but it’s not ideal. The most important disadvantage is that WordPress needs constant updating and their dashboard is not intuitive or flexible. And if you want to make any visual changes that go beyond what your template offers, you’ll need to ask your developer for their help.
The third approach – one that is the most cost-effective and gives small businesses like yours all the flexibility – is to use drag-and-drop website builders. They come with free, ready-made templates, intuitive user interfaces (UIs), and don’t require that you know any HTML or CSS. Plus, you don’t need to update them to have your website up and running without any delays.
Some of them, like GetResponse Free Website Builder, also help you further improve the process of building your website and your online presence by:
- Using AI to build the perfect website to match your business goals and needs
- Giving you access to thousands of free high-resolution images you can use on your pages
- Automatically connecting your website with marketing solutions to run email marketing campaigns, connect with your audience through live chats, or run paid ads through Facebook or Google
- Automatically making your pages mobile-friendly and secure with free SSL
- Giving you free web hosting and letting you register your own domain right inside the dashboard
To choose the best website builder you should refer to the outcomes of your research in the previous steps. If you’ve narrowed down the types of pages, content, capabilities, and visual layouts you’d like to have on your website, you should browse through the most popular website builders and see which ones check most of your boxes.
Once you’ve narrowed down your list, go ahead and try them out. Most of these tools come with a free or free trial account that’ll give you a better feel of their UI and how easy they’re to use.
On top of that, when choosing your favorite website builder, you may also want to look at these slightly more advanced factors:
- Does the website builder come with any specific limitations or, for example, does it offer unlimited bandwidth?
- Does the website builder offer search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities?
- Does the website builder come with a content management system (CMS), and how complex is it?
- How difficult it is to connect other essential tools, such as Google Analytics?
- Is it an actual drag-and-drop builder? And does it require additional skills like HTML or CSS?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QsS71RJnjHc%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26enablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%3A%252F%252Fwww.getresponse.com
5. Choose your web host
When building a website from scratch, you may also need to choose where your page will be hosted – the place where all the files that make your website will be stored.
Choosing the right web hosting provider is important for a few reasons:
- It can affect the speed and performance of your website, which is key to ranking high in search engines.
- It can help you ensure your business website is secure and capable of withstanding any potential threats.
- It can help you back up your files and the whole website so that it doesn’t get lost under unforeseen circumstances.
- On top of that, different web hosts provide various levels of service in terms of customer support or flexibility to make changes in your website settings (such as DNS settings).
In other words, the web hosting provider can heavily impact how effective your website is and how your small business will be seen by others.
The good news is that most of the popular web hosts have robust capabilities, and the difference between them will largely be noticed by bigger companies that attract hundreds of thousands of website visitors every month.
Small businesses won’t need to worry, especially if they’re creating their business website using a website builder, like the one offered by GetResponse. Most of these tools offer highly reliable free web hosting, meaning that you don’t need to dive into the technicalities yourself. And if you’re building a personal website or even a website for your small business, you don’t want to have to stress about these things.
6. Choose your domain name
It’s time to pick a domain name for your business. In other words, the URL address your target audience will need to type into their browser to find your website.
When using a website builder, you’ll have the option to pick between a free domain and registering your own custom domain.
Using GetResponse Website Builder as an example, this means your page can have the following URLs if you were to use one of the free domains:
- YourCompanyName.grwebsite.com
- YourCompanyName.grweb.site
Now, if you registered your own custom domain, the URL would be much simpler and more memorable, like this:
- YourCompanyName.com
- YourCompanyName.org
- YourCompanyName.io
- Etc.
As you may have noticed, when registering a custom domain you can choose which extension you want to use (for example .com). This is called the top-level domain (TLD).
The difference between those isn’t only in how memorable a given domain name is. The key things are reputation and the potential effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
As a business owner, you want your website and your domain name to have a higher reputation. The stronger the domain, the easier it will be for you to drive website traffic from search engines such as Google or Bing.
Now, how one builds domain reputation is another story (for example citations, link-building), but the important part is that if you’re using a free domain that means your reputation is built and shared by everyone else that’s also using the same domain. Although good for the start, this isn’t an ideal scenario.
It’s also important to have your own registered domain name if you’re planning to run email marketing campaigns. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail or Yahoo! more favorably filter email communication that comes from registered domains rather than from domains that are widely available for everyone. As a result, using a custom domain name can increase your inbox placement rate, as well as the chances of converting your audience with your emails.
Now the good news is that if you’re using a website builder like GetResponse, you can register a custom domain name right inside the tool, and you’ll also have an email domain set up for you automatically. That means you don’t need to play around with the technical settings (like SPF or DKIM) to build high deliverability, a solid sender reputation, and have an overall strong online presence.
7. Add your content and customize the layout
Now that you’ve done all the setup work, it’s time to start putting the pieces together.
In your website builder, you should have three options like the one in GetResponse:
- Pick a ready-made template and customize it to your liking
- Use an AI tool to create a website based on the information you provide, like your website goal and industry
- Build the entire website from scratch (using a blank template)
If it’s the first time you’re building a website, I highly recommend that you go for one of the first two options. It’ll help you get started more quickly and the drag-and-drop editor will give you all the flexibility you need to adjust the web design and pages to your liking.
Within your website builder, you should be able to:
- Add new pages and remove the ones you don’t want to see
- Fill in your own content (text, buttons, images, links, videos, etc.)
- Add contact forms and subscription forms
- Add social media icons
- Customize what goes into your navigation menu
- Manage the website and individual page settings (title, description, favicon)
- Integrate external tools, like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel
- Add an online store and payment processors (coming soon in GetResponse)
- Create membership sites and limited-access pages
On top of that, you may also have access to additional tools that’ll help you quickly migrate your existing website (coming soon) and create color palettes based on your company logo.
When it comes to the types of pages you can include on your website, the choice will largely rely on the kind of business you’re running. There are some standard pages that most small businesses include though, no matter if they’re running an online store, donation site, or even a church website:
Homepage
Every website needs an inviting homepage. In most cases, it’s the first page your website visitors will see, so it must make a good first impression and get your audience hooked. Make sure your homepage is well designed, clear, and includes intuitive navigation because you want it to direct the different kinds of users you’re going to attract to the relevant places on your website.
Conclusion
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