What you need to know to design your own business website

In today’s entrepreneurial economy, it’s increasingly important to be able to have complete oversight of your whole operation, including how your website works. In what follows, we’ll break down everything you need to know about how your website functions and what you can do to improve it.

Coding: HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Coding is the mainstay of web design with most websites comprising a range of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main file type downloaded by your browser when it loads a web page. Functional and familiar, this is the baseline of any good website. With that said, a website made up solely of HTML would look pretty basic.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to add color and style to your site. These enable you to shape your website, select font types and even add animations.

JavaScript

This programming language enables you to determine how different elements of your website interact with one another. It is used to make your website more dynamic by creating slideshows, scrolling transitions, and other moving parts.

Front-end responsive design

Once you’ve nailed the basics of coding, you’ll want to learn about intermediate front-end skills to create appealing websites. According to Google, interruptive mobile browsing experiences will stop 46% of consumers buying from a brand forever.

If you’re coding your own site from scratch, familiarise yourself with frameworks. These are preloaded CSS and JavaScript packages that you can build on to create your own responsive design. However, something like this is best left to the professionals. Using a professional web design agency will ensure that your website is optimized for mobile use, which ensures that any customers browsing your site on their mobiles will get the same experience as they would do on their desktop.

Being aware of what your website is like on multiple different devices will ensure that you are staying ahead of your competitors and getting sales in places where they are not, like on mobile and tablet.

Back-end basics

In descending order of importance, the main back-end languages are Java, C, C++, Python, and C#. Back-end development is heavily dependent on database management as well, with another associated programming language: SQL (structured query language).

To create a publicly accessible website, you have to take responsibility for hosting and maintenance. Understanding this is vital, as without having public access, there isn’t much point in the website itself. Setting up your own servers and registering a domain is one of the most important things to be done, so make sure that there are no problems with this.

There’s an additional learning curve here to fully secure your servers, adding a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on top of your SSL.

Time is money

Hopefully this article has provided you with the basics of understanding how your website works and how you can improve it. Having basic knowledge of all areas of your business, including the website is vital to being able to run a successful business; however, just remember that time is money. If you’re looking to improve your website or create another one, sometimes it is better off left with the experts.