Freelance Web Design. What does building a website involve?

Working as a freelance web designer means I will be directly responsible for your website project from start to finish. To give you an idea of what's involved in creating a website I have provided a brief description below: -

The first stage of building a website is to present the client with a design, or set of designs, that the client is happy with. Designs may be based on logos supplied or any colour schemes that are required due to branding guidelines. I use the latest copy of professional image editing-software, Adobe Photoshop, to create all of my designs.

Once this has been achieved the next step is to turn this design, or designs, into a working website. This is done through the use of languages called HTML (Hypertext Mark up Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) where 'code' is manually written to form the structure of a web page. HTML is responsible for the content of a webpage (i.e. the actual text, images and links) while CSS is used to control the style (i.e. colors etc), presentation and layout (i.e. width and dimensions).

What's good and bad practice in Web Design?

Many people attempting to make a website will simply use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program to build your site through automatically generated code. Numerous examples can also be found on the internet in the readily available "Make Your Own Website" packages. This process is no more difficult than using a program such as Microsoft Word and it will result in a poor quality web page. Web pages that have been constructed in a WYSIWYG program are likely to suffer from the following issues:

• Poorly constructed HTML & CSS code, which is difficult to update and maintain
• Pages will not be search engine friendly
• Updates to the website (if it's a large site) will be more difficult
• The HTML code may contain numerous coding errors, which can cause cross-web browser incompatibility and confuse search engines, reducing your target audience
• Pages are often laid out with the use of "tables" which are used for tabular data and are not intended for website layouts.

In contrast, I ensure that all of my websites are "hand-coded" using valid and error-free XHTML & CSS code which means they are:-

• Fast loading
• Search engine friendly
• Compatible across all major web browsers
• Designed for a maximum target audience
• Coded to the latest web standards set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

To see the websites I have created please have a look at my portfolio.