What is your web design process?

[morrysillusion]

this is quite a broad question but, being so early into designing my site i would love to hear about the process people went through in their web page designs and if anything specific drove you to a look, or had you decide what you have now was what you wanted? of course, people can and do change their pages all the time, but with what you have right now, id love to hear people's thoughts. i am just realizing how indecisive i feel when i flip through tons and tons of sites thinking "oh, i want to do that!" and "oh, that looks nice, ill do that--". it feels impossible to settle on something...

so while i havent finished my site or even gotten close to settling on a look for the long run, i have found that literally drawing out the layout has helped me conceptualize the look without coding it, but also stops me from in a sense wasting my time chasing a layout i may not even like by the time i finish writing it lol. of course, it looks and feels different when its actually made... but with all the fleeting ideas i am getting inspired by others, i think its helped to do that.

i am an artist but, not a web designer... and i imagine many many people here are also not web designers either lol. so im curious to hear if anyone has a specific way they tackle design. i think i get overwhelmed when i put it through my typical artist eyes or perfection, though.

[NacreousDreams]

Seeing as my site is still rather new, a bit of what I say is about general programming (which I'm also not the most experienced in, but... hey, I'm tryin! ).

My general approach is to set a goal for what I want to do, then do a bit of research on how to attain that goal, and then put it to work. It's very experimental in nature, which creates a cycle of learning that I thoroughly enjoy.

As an example, for the last update to my site, my goal was "add a sidebar for links to the page". The main issue was "how do I get two separate elements to display horizontally, instead of vertically?" Now, I like to reverse-engineer solutions whenever I can, so I tried looking at the source code for sites on Neocities that had side bars. But not only did I learn little from it, I got called a thief! I guess people on that host have it rough with content theft, so I can't really be upset about that.

Okay, that didn't work; what else should I do? Well, I reviewed articles on W3schools, as well as a YouTube vid, and eventually figured out how to use the "position" attribute in CSS to position elements relative to others. Sure enough, that did the trick! I've got a couple bugs to deal with, but I can figure those out in time; what matters is that I achieved my goal! And I learned about several other things, too, some of which I can make into future goals.

[Melooon]

Hmm, typically I have an idea of the kind of vibe and loose layout I want for a page, but I have no particular plan. Sometimes I get started on a page and it goes amazingly and its perfect right away... BUT more often than not it totally does not work and the idea needs rethinking Also a lot of the time I start pages very simply (Like putting 3 images and a header) and then I evolve them over time.

I think in both cases its a mix of having ideas, knowing how other people have done things, and trial n error. I might make 100-10,000 edits on a new page as Im creating it. Going back and forth with different images and colours and sizes of things.

The nature of the stuff on the page informs how the page needs to look, and vice versa, the way the page needs to look decides what can be put on it. Its a dance!

[Kitchen Staff]

I usually think of what I'll put on a web page first (Like information on a character or images), then I program all of that, then I do CSS stuff to fit with the theme of the page.I update the looks and information on it when I think of new things or like the look of something.

[Gans]

If you want to make your site look good on smartphones, maybe simplify the layout to a single column, scrolling from the top to the bottom. The navigation bar would be horizontal then (on the top and optionally on the bottom). And you don't have to think too much about a complex layout. Limits the creativity of course, but might be a good start for you (and you make the smartphone users happy).

Stealing code and ideas from other sites would be perfectly fine for me. Maybe try to modify it slightly (delete spaces and line breaks, put the tags in a different order, add nonsense comments in the code) so that you can declare it as being "inspired" from somewhere else.

I wouldn't start making a webpage through messing around with the plain HTML tags. Use a WYSIWIG editor if you're unsure at the beginning. Then you can twist and turn around your content on the web page like a puzzle until it fits for your eye. My choice for an HTML editor is Nvu, that is nowadays being called Kompozer.