Launching a website is one of the first things business owners have to prioritize to set themselves up for success. Indeed, getting online is of the utmost importance in the digital age, as the internet allows businesses the best and most efficient means to reach potential clients. 89% of adults in the United States use the internet, 20% of which access the internet mostly via their smartphones.

And while it’s always an option to hire professionals to create a website for you, you can always just tweak your site on your own. This is simple enough to do with low-code site builders like Wix or Squarespace, but they can be limited in terms of customizability. This is why business owners and beginners are learning to do it themselves. The four million students taking Udemy’s range of web development courses is a testament to how essential it has become to learn at least the basics. These can help you design your site to look and function precisely how you want it to, no matter your skill level. So, if you’ve decided to jump in and build your site, here are a few web development concepts to learn and apply:

Mobile Optimization

As we stated above, many people access the internet via their smartphones. What this entails is that websites now have to be optimized for smartphone use as well as web browsers. Not accounting for smartphones could mean that your site could be viewed differently on phones, or in worse case be downright unusable. One way you can do this is by improving upon your site’s thumb-friendly navigation.

An article on Medium details how one effective way to do this is by making use of all that screen space by maximizing horizontal navigation. This means moving the navigation options – the buttons that let you switch pages – to the side of the screen rather than the traditional way of having them at the top or the bottom of the screen.

Keep it Simple

Our article on ‘Understanding UX Design as a Web Developer’ explains how design is geared towards solving a specific problem, to fill a need that is determined by your intended users and audience. This entails a minimalist approach to web design that keeps your site’s features and components to the bare essentials.

A good rule of thumb for this is to run each part of your site through a checklist that determines if your site needs this element. Does the element make your website easier to traverse for your user? How does the element contribute to the overall goal and purpose of your site? Answering these questions will help you decide which parts to keep and which ones to discard.

Make Designs Flexible

Lastly, an important thing to take note of is that your website will go through many updates and redesigns to keep up with the ever changing demand of your users and audience.

One way to keep up with these constant changes is to create your site using a library of codes and other assets that you can just plug-in instead of writing code from scratch. By doing this, you can freely choose to plug-in and change elements of your site from the same library of codes and assets. You can update it depending on the needs of your audience, thus saving you time and effort in the long run.

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