Whether you’re just entering the website development field and want to get started on your first web site, full-blown website or you’re an amateur just trying to put together your personal website, it can be a daunting task when you see all of the jargon and options available. Don’t worry, most aspects of website development are actually pretty straight-forward. The confusion is usually in the terminology and the complicated-sounding technologies you’ll be using.

Almost all of website development is about understanding Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the design elements of making a functional website. When you see a good site on the Web, you usually don’t notice the design elements very much. That’s what makes the sites so good. It’s when those elements, like navigation, graphics, and the information on the page, get in the way or distract the user, that you notice them. This means the site’s designer, or website developer, did not do his or her job correctly.

When you’re an amateur building a website for fun or family, then this may not be as important to you. Most likely, you’re using an online site builder or free website tool. The professional, however, should be very concerned about these design elements. The only way to know if your elements are correct is practice, revision, and criticism. Look around the internet at sites that you admire and focus on these elements to see how they accomplished what they did. Find similar sites and check them and look at sites that don’t come up to standards and note their mistakes. Learn from other people’s website development efforts in order to better your own.

Now comes the fun part: experimentation! The best way to learn on your own is to try things. Don’t be afraid to fail, since it’s your mistake and no one’s going to fault you but you. Learn from it and try again. Play around with different concepts of navigation and design, fill pages with useless gibberish or random content so you can see what handling large amounts of written material is like. Make drop-down, hover-changing, and other kinds of menus to see how the buttons interact and the scripting holds up to expansion and changes. Above all, though, experiment with your website development!

Once you’re confident with your skills, start building your first site—probably your own professional site to sell yourself. The successes during your experimentation are now your portfolio. Good work! Keep working, trying, and succeeding by learning from your failures. Website development is about practice and knowledge. Don’t let your lack of experience hold you back, but instead utilize your unbounded imagination. Keep trying!

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Now that you’re ready to do something for real, you’ll need to know some basic concepts about website development to keep your sites well-grounded. You’ll need to know: what the focus of the site-to-be is, what kind of content will be included with, how much content is expected, how often feedback from the client will be given, and what kind of hosting will the site be on when completed (often the same as during development). There may be other questions, but these are the most basic.

The focus of the site is merely what the site is for: is it a sales site, online store, or glorified brochure. In other words, what’s the point of the thing? You’ll need to have at least a rough idea of what kind of content will be used on the site and how much of it (text, graphics, audio/video, etc.) there will be. Some clients are very open to letting you run with their website’s development and come up with your own, while others want to control the process from start-to-finish and have a clear idea of what they want. This covers the question about client feedback. Most sites are built in stages, with a “skeleton” going up first to solidify the major design elements and the details and content going in next, page-by-page or section-by-section. The question of site hosting is very important if the site is to be anything more than just a cut-and-dried brochure or text-only site—a site that doesn’t use much or any audio/visual or back-end scripting like shopping carts.

Now the fun begins! Building the site needs to be somewhat organized, but if you’re given some leeway, take advantage of it and have fun with the concept. Start with organizing the content and creating a game plan for how the site will “flow” or be laid out for the user, from index page to final purchase or final goal. Use this game plan to start building the backbone of your site: its navigation. Square this away first, before you do anything else on the site. The navigation is so integral to the design, website development, and even file structure of the site on the server that it must be the first thing completed and ready to go. Changes to the navigation, once implemented, will probably be difficult and will affect everything else about the site.

Once that’s done, it’s a matter of taste and style. Once you’ve got a feel for your client and their business (and therefore their client?le), you can come up with a graphical design based around your navigation scheme to make the site great. After that, it’s mostly just “plug-n-play” with content. Most sites are built on a basic template, which contains the major graphic elements and the navigation. This is because continuity throughout the site is visually appealing and less confusing to the visitor.

That’s the basics of website development, in just a page or two. There is more to it, of course, but you’ll learn most of it as you go. Once you’ve got the foundation I’ve outlined here, you’re ready to learn the rest by experimentation. Besides, that’s more fun than reading some boring article anyway. So have at it!

The holy grail of website design is not a site that wins awards at some design conference or at a geek convention. The holy grail of web design is searched for and found every day by designers and scripters just like you. This web design holy grail is a website that sells. Whether it sells products, services, or free information, it doesn’t matter. It sells. That’s what commercial websites are all about and that is what you should be striving for when you design a site for a business.

Of course, this selling isn’t always direct. Sometimes a site is just a glorified online brochure for a company. That site is still selling. It’s selling the company that you’ve made the site for, so it is still a web design that sells. Your goal as a website designer is to sell your client’s products, not to make flashy widgets that look really cool and accomplish nothing but wasted bandwidth and maybe an award or two for your portfolio.

This can’t be overemphasized. I am contacted by both businesses looking for website designers and by designers wanting to know if I have any work for them. I rarely match them up because those designers who’re looking for work have portfolios full of work that might look good in an art gallery or a design show, but that is not what business sites need in order to succeed on the World Wide Web.

So now the question is, “what exactly is web design that sells?” Fortunately, that part is easy to explain. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to accomplish. Many web designers think of themselves as artists, but they think of this “art” in the wrong way. They think they’re visual artists who create art using the electronic medium of the web. That’s not the case. Web designers are more like interactive or audience participation artists. They’re more like illusionists and magicians than they are like mimes. This means your business site design is not about wowing the eyeballs, but instead getting the visitor involved in the site itself: getting them to click, to read, to participate. That’s the true art of web design.

To accomplish this, your design must be simple, but not boring. It must be interactive, but easy to use. And most of all it must be gently guiding the visitor towards a goal: usually a sale, or the piece of information they’ve been searching for.

Let’s look at an all-time favorite of ultra-simplistic design: Google. This home page is probably the fastest-loading page on the web that consists of more than just “.” Yet it’s one of the most user-friendly and most-visited sites on the Internet. Another great example is eBay. A little more complex, yes, but still fast-loading and very clean to look at. Very rarely does a visitor to eBay not know how to use this site—everything is laid out for them simply and neatly. All while still selling.

Simple and effective design is much more than just graphics and obscure talk about “visual flow.” It’s all about how the user interacts with the site and what the visitor can get out of the site quickly. Most definitely it’s about “selling” the site through its web design elements. Often this involves a strong mesh of team work between the designer, copywriter, and the back-end programmer.

The search for the grail continues as designers who understand their business continue to find innovative ways to make web design that sells rather than web design that wins obscure awards. Moving away from pure “art for arts sake,” they’re capturing the holy grail and winning the awards that matter: happy clients who come back and send their friends and colleagues. That is great web design!