Building your website is a step-by-step process.

The two most important things in this life are time and money, in that order. It’s hard to know how to allocate them when you don’t know what tools are available.

Two Questions

So, take a moment to ask yourself two questions.

1. How much time you have to devote to learning about building your website?
2. How much money do you have to spend?

If you have plenty of both, then you have to decide if your time or money is more valuable. If you think you don’t have either, you’ll be surprised how fast building your website is.

Three Methods

In this module of posts, I talk about building your website in one of three ways.

First, do you want to use web development software? Adobe Dreamweaver is the most popular software available. One big reason why is because Dreamweaver is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Creative Cloud has a lot of software, like Photoshop. You also only pay $52.99 per month for full use of Creative Cloud. And yet the market share for Dreamweaver is tiny because people prefer a content management system (CMS).

A CMS gives people the ability to design their sites with templates. WordPress is the most popular CMS, and so it has plenty of templates. You can also get templates from third-party companies like Elegant Themes. I use their themes for this blog site and the BCG website.

WordPress gives you a lot of power. And it allows users to update the website pretty easily. But if you need a lot of control over the design, then you need to code in HTML and especially CSS. One advantage WordPress has is a lot of free support and plugins to make things easier.

If complete control is what you want, you don’t need to use WordPress or any other CMS. You can use a text editor to code in HTML and CSS…even simple ones like Notepad or Apple Notes.

What’s Next

In this second series of web design posts, I’ll talk about these options from a business angle. The first article is online now. By the time you finish reading them, you’ll know which option for building your website is best for you.

What’s more, I’ll talk about building your website in terms of time and money. You have a business to run, after all.

More posts are coming soon, so bookmark this page. Better yet, follow our social media profiles. I announce new posts there once they’re online.

Eric Butow is the owner of Butow Communications Group and has designed websites since 1997. Please feel free to comment with questions and ideas to help make this series as useful as possible. Thanks!