Dogbark.com >> How To
>> Design >> Do it Yourself
If you are the type of person that spends countless hours figuring things out on your own then you'll love designing for the Internet.
• Design Your Site
A good way to plan the design of your site is to layout the basic look on paper first. Then when you have a direction you wish to pursue try to lay it out in a drawing program like Adobe Illustrator. If you site is image heavy see if you can lay it out in Photoshop. Once you have that worked out then you can start with production. Oh joy. Sounds like fun to you? Keep on reading.
• Choose your production method
If you are into the pain and agony of designing your own web site we recommend using either Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive. These are WYSIWYG programs and you can get a 30 day trial for each by going to our Good Stuff section. Sure, you can be a code warrior and do it line by line but who has time to learn and write code these days? We actually use Dreamweaver and BB Edit. So, we're kinda doing a combination of using a WYSIWYG and writing the code line by line.
• Basic Do's and Don'ts of Design
Do always call your home page "index.html" or "index.htm" or "index.php". This is what servers default to as the page to be viewed in any directory. Don't name your home page something like "Home.html". You won't get the results you want.
Do put your images in a directory (folder) called "images" or something like that. Don't put every single file and image for your site in the same directory (folder). That's just bad house keeping. Don't forget to protect that directory with a blank index.html page to prevent people from easily snagging all of your pictures from one folder.
Do name your files using some logic like "small_green_logo.gif". Don't name your files using spaces or special characters like # or & etc.
Do make your images a respectable size so they load fast. Don't make your images so big and hi-res that your page loads slow. No one likes slow pages.
Do use advanced stuff like Flash to make your site more exciting with motion. Don't make your entire site one single Flash file. No one wants to wait for a 2 MB home page.