There are plenty of professionals who can design a website for you based in and around Greater Manchester. However, you won’t necessarily need to spend a great deal to get a new website up and running depending on what you are after. For most small business needs or a personal blog site, you can probably do everything you need yourself even if you have no prior web design or graphic design experience. What’s involved with setting up a new website that looks professional even though it might have been put together by a complete novice? Read on to find out.
Website Hosting and Building
To begin with, you will need a hosting service for your site. This is where the website will be stored in the cloud, typically on a server somewhere (or even on more than one server so there’s a backup if there’s ever an outage). Mancunians can find many hosting providers in and around the city but if you’re building a website from scratch, then it will be beneficial to turn to a provider that has an integrated website builder tool you can use. These take the hassle out of making choices about the design and layout of your site because they offer pre-prepared templates that you can simply adapt to your needs. Your site won’t be too similar to other ones, though, because you can change the font, logo, pictures, text, colour scheme and virtually everything else, if you want. Website building templates also have the advantage of being optimised for different devices. In other words, you won’t have to worry about the technical aspects of rescaling a site to look good on a phone in portrait mode even if you put it together in landscape mode on a laptop.
Graphical Elements and Design
With the site up and running, you will need to add content. These days, visual content can be very beneficial in attracting attention. Upload images in a thumbnail format so they don’t slow your site down when pages are loaded but also have them available in a higher resolution. This way, if someone clicks on them, they’ll be able to see them more clearly. Graphic design elements will go a long way to make your site look truly professional. Pay particular attention to your logo because these look awful if they’ve been scanned in poorly. Ideally, you’ll design a logo – or have one designed for you – larger than you need for your site so you can reduce it in size rather than the other way around. Keep the design aesthetic simple. If pages become too time-consuming to get through, then consider chopping them in two or three and making sub-pages. This will be especially important if your website is for a firm in Manchester offering services. Ideally, each service you provide will have its own page, something that’s known as a landing page which is useful for attracting new business.
Conclusion
To conclude, setting up a new website should only take a couple of hours at most. Once it is up and running, you can use digital marketing techniques to help it get the attention it deserves, especially by adding new and relevant content frequently.
