As the owner of a business in Orange County, it is helpful if you know some of the basics of website design. You can use a popular platform like WordPress to set up your site, and it is not complicated to start creating the content and the visuals for it.

It’s possible that at some juncture you may need to hire someone more experienced to come in and do the fine-tuning, but fundamental website design skills will serve you well, especially if you’re a small business owner and your budget is limited. Here are some aspects of setting up your site on which you can get started.

Develop a Page Hierarchy

Setting up a page hierarchy is one of the most critical things that you can do as an Orange County website designer. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you could look at it in this way. Your website is going to have several different pages. Your hierarchy is the order in which they should go.

That means you’ll want to have your landing page, and you’ll need to know what sort of content should go there. You’ll probably have different pages for various services or products. If you can plan out what you want these pages to look like and where you want them to go, that’s a logical place to begin setting up the site.

Look for Inspiration

Another thing that you can do requires no coding or specialized skills. That is to look at other websites to get some ideas for your own. They can be sites that are in your niche, or maybe they have nothing to do with it, but you happen to like the visuals, some of the fonts that are being used, or the page layouts.

The idea is not to copy from these other sites. Instead, it is to get some ideas on which you might want to expand. You’ll need to put your own twist on things to make your site original when the time comes to do the coding, select the graphics, etc.   

Purchase a Domain

You’ll also need to pick yourself out a domain name, make sure that no one else has it already, and purchase it. Orange County businesses that have a unique name might be in luck if no one else owns their company name in website form yet. If it is owned, you’ll need to get a little creative and come up with some derivation of it or some other phrase that has something to do with your products or services.

Once you’ve done these things, you can either tackle the more complicated parts of the website design that follow them or else you can contact an SEO company or a freelancer who will build the site for you. They’ll be glad that you’ve taken these preliminary steps because they won’t have as much to do. You’ll save them some time and energy, and you’ll likely save yourself some money in the process that can then be allocated for other things.