Beginner’s Guide to Building a Professional (looking) Website

I’ve never been one to blog consistently, but lately I’ve been even more sparse than usual with my posts.  This is in large part to another project I’ve been working on for a few months now: my boyfriend’s website.  Robby is an incredibly talented musician in need of killer website — and his simple do-it-himself RapidWeaver creation just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

I’ve been tinkering around with CSS, PHP and Javascript recently, and since I already had some HTML and graphic design experience in my back pocket, I told Robby I’d give it a go and build it from the ground up.  So I present to you… RobbyMarshall.com 2.0!

I encourage you to check it out, not necessarily to toot my own horn, but more so because I think you might enjoy Robby’s music.  The site is hardly finished — we’ve still got plenty of photos and other fun stuff to put up, but we just got out of beta mode so I was eager to show it off.  Pretty soon I will be tackling the task of subscription services and e-commerce, so stay tuned for that.

If you’re looking to build your own website, or even just spice up a blog, here are a few beginner’s tips that really helped me out:

• WordPress.org.  If you are an artist, a freelance anything, a small business or just someone who has thoughts, I can’t recommend WordPress enough.   Most hosting services already offer it as an easy-to-install application.  Though it was built as blogging software, WP’s open-source coding has made it optimal for building professional websites as well.  On top of that, their search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities are top-notch — this, perhaps more than anything else, is invaluable.  (See last point.)
• Themes. This is where the old saying “you get what you pay for” holds true.  Paying for premium WordPress themes is the best way to get a professional, polished look.  As a bonus, most of them come with support forums in which you can ask newbie questions and receive personalized help.   Now a word from the wise: do not go trolling for free pirated premium themes on file sharing sites.  On top of breaking copyright laws, you are usually walking into a trap — many of those “free” themes will have hidden hacks and links (often to porn sites), or worse, viruses or malware.  Studiopress has a great article about how to avoid these suspicious themes. There are too many unexplored themes out there to have a favorite, but I’ve enjoyed using Studiopress Lifestyle 4.0 theme on The Wanderkind and really liked the interface of Headway Themes in building Robby’s site.  (More great “theme frameworks” here.)
• CSS. If you want to have any control over the design of your theme, teach yourself some basic CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.  You’ll need that knowledge if you want to change anything from margin widths to the way a link changes color when your mouse hovers over it.  Check out CSS Basics for a solid tutorial.
• DOM inspector. Headway actually pointed me toward this while I was making Robby’s site, and now I can’t imagine designing one without it.  This application breaks down the HTML, CSS and script code of every web page you’re looking at, allowing you to see the code with its corresponding element.  If you use Firefox, get Firebug.  Safari already comes with Web Inspector.  Get DebugBar for Internet Explorer (although most experienced developers will gag at the thought of designing on IE).  Here’s what Firebug looks like when I run it on my site:

• SEO.  Good WordPress themes have solid SEO built into it already, so there’s little you have to do except know how to maximize what you have.  The point of SEO is so that people who don’t know who you are can find you when they are searching for terms related to your site.  Quick tips: make sure your page/post titles reflect the topic properly, add meta tags wherever possible and use lots of relevant links — the link text should relate to the link itself as opposed to saying “click here.”

I’ve done enough geeking out for one post.  I’ve got a couple of other projects in the works, so hopefully I’ll have some more insights to share later.  Feel free to send me any questions, and I promise to do my best to point you in the right direction.