Website planning
Planning a website involves many steps and has a lot of need to know knowledge in it. Planning a website can take a long time and in this blog I will talk about some of the steps I have taken so far and also some of the planning for my website.
Finding My Theme
One of the first steps I have taken so far in my website building process is finding out which theme I want to use. This is arguably one of the most important steps in the website building process so I made sure to take my time and think about what I wanted. I am planning on building a portfolio type website so I wanted my theme to be Modern, Comfortable and appealing to the viewer because portfolio is all about showing off your work and I want a professional feel to it.
I started by comparing Astra and Neve in WordPress and used a comparison matrix to find out that I want going to use Neve as my theme because it had a more professional feel compared to Astra. Another reason I went with Neve is because it had more of the Customization options that I was looking for making it easy for me to modify it as I want.
Organizing My Content
With my theme in mind I started thinking about how I wanted the layout of my website to look. On paper I drew a blueprint of how I wanted my website layout to look including Home page, About page, Contact page, FAQs page, and then my Portfolio page. I tried to make it as easy as possible for the viewer to find the contact me section and I plan on adding more ways to get to the contact me section of my website later.
This Website map will help me find Call To Action points and allow me to see if the flow of the website will be easy or difficult for the viewer and then I can make changes where needed. Here I will add a link for additional information on website planning and the importance. https://slickplan.com/blog/site-mapping-a-comprehensive-guide – By Ian Lawson
Designing My Mood Board
Another step I had to do to figure out how i want my website to look is by making a mood board to get a feel of what colors, fonts, and pictures I want to add to my website. I am trying to get a more Professional, comfortable and modern feel so I chose more tan and brown colors and multiple shades of grey black and white. And chose fonts like Roboto, Montserrat, Oswald, and Assistant to keep the professional feel in the fonts as well. In my opinion I think the Mood Board is one of the most important steps in planning a website because it allows you to see how your colors, images, and Fonts will look on your site.
Optimizing Images
Sometimes images can slow down the site for users. This is usually for mobile users or non-desktop users, which is why I plan to use tinypng.com to optimize all of the images on my website to make it safe and high quality for all viewers on the website. Having a high-quality website for all viewers can widen your range of viewers so optimizing images is very important.
My Next Steps
Now that I have picked my theme, designed my mood board, and organized my content I need to figure out how i will plan on actually designing my home page and other pages. I need to think about where I will put my call to actions and my navigation links and I also have to find images to put on my home page as well.
I am going to use my mood board as a reference to find images that have the same colors, fonts, and professional/modern feeling as the ones on my mood board I made. Another step I need to do is find plugins to add to my site to make it better, I already have Google analytics but I plan to add more.
Conclusion
This is my current planning process and ideas for making my website. It took a lot of work to make all my foundations like my Theme, website map, and mood board. I look forward to completing the next steps that I have to do and I also look forward to seeing the progress in my website.