Do you want to learn how to design your own website, but you’re paralyzed by fear and immobilized by the sheer volume of choices and conflicting advice? Listen up, I think you may find this information useful.

When I first took my copywriting business to the web, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew I had to have a website if I wanted to get clients, but I was going about it the wrong way, using that antiquated Trellix SiteBuilder program that Earthlink offers with their web hosting package. That program is an incredibly convoluted way to work; do not use it.

I will also add here that SiteBuilder will do absolutely nothing for your search engine rank because the pages are automatically named in a numerical format. Just don’t even bother with it, is what I’m telling you.

So anyway, after growing thoroughly disgusted with that, I thought I might invest in Dreamweaver (I’d heard that word being bandied about by the tech geeks at my old corporate job) but I wasn’t sure if it’d be worth the money. Would I even be able to learn web design?

I started hanging around with web design experts over on the Ryze Business Network and asking lots of questions. I met awesome web design professionals like Russ Jackman who opened my eyes to the free WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Editing program NVU (pronounced N-View) and I downloaded it to my computer.

(Let me give it to you on its own line: the software is NVU and it doesn’t cost anything to download.)

I found it was nothing like Quark Express, which was the last design-based program I’d used on a long-term basis and felt really comfortable in. I couldn’t understand why the boxes that I’d created looked fine in the NVU editing area, but then when I viewed them in a browser they were all flying off to the left and taking my text with them.

That caused me to pull some hair out for a while, but the learning curve and aggravation really was worth it. NVU is open source, free, and a great way to dip your toe in the web design waters.

Of course, there are other aspects of HTML that you really should master in addition to maneuvering around editing programs. During my first year of experimenting, I kept Liz Castro’s HTML for the World Wide Web on hand at all times. If you don’t supplement your forays into web design with basic knowledge from this book, you can end up pretty confused. Thankfully, Liz’s writing and instructions are hands-on and easy to understand and apply.

So that’s it, two essential ingredients for learning how to build website pages:

1. NVU’s open source HTML editing software
2. Liz Castro’s fine manual, HTML for the World Wide Web.

Let me know how you find this system - and when you feel comfortable, you can move on to buying your own copy of the Adobe Dreamweaver design suite.

Good luck and have fun.

- Dina at Wordfeeder.com Copywriting and Marketing

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Email Dina@Wordfeeder.com for a copywriting or website marketing quote today.

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