These days I have been working very hard towards building a brand for myself, my website being one of the milestones.

For those of you who are reading my blog for the first time and do not know me well, I am a Graphic designer working full-time with an oil and gas company. Usually, I have very busy days and sometimes I even have to stay back late to not miss my deadlines. Keeping aside all these worries I try to accomplish some part of my website either at night or while I am being driven to my office and back home.

Five things which I personally believe should be taken care of when we plan to create our own website:

Do not start randomly

By starting randomly I mean do not start right away instead always have a plan ready before you start creating your own website. Once you have the plan, analyze your audience, your product, your purpose, etc. and start wireframing your website. (I will be discussing these steps in detail in my coming blog posts)

Do not wait for perfection

Do not start random sometimes make designers think that we need to roll out a website that is perfect for my audience. No No No a big No. We do not need to create a perfect website. Even the perfect designs have a lot of scope for improvement so one can always roll out a basic website displaying our skills and capabilities to the audience and then keep on improving it side by side as per the feedback and comments we receive from our audience.

All that glitters is not Gold

Do not assume that only if a website looks very fancy it will be able to attract an audience. Here I always take Facebook as an example, when Facebook came into the market it was not at all fancy looking but still, it was able to attract a lot of audience from the then-popular and fancy social networking website Orkut.

Not having everything is OK

When I start creating a website I always try to look for inspirations to keep me motivated throughout the project. Though having inspiration acts as a plus for me but for some these inspirations become a burden. Designers start trying to create a website as perfect as the inspiration. Hold on, guys! you need to cool down. The website that you see as an inspiration must have gone through a dozen rounds of comments and feedback and would not have looked like this in the first instance. Also, do not try to have all the features in the first go. It is always ok to not have everything on the website in the beginning.

Allow and accept criticism positively

Always remember, Criticism if handled effectively become a path to success. We often tend to resist taking feedback but trust me, this is the only free resource you have. Sometimes you do not even realize that the random feedback you received while sharing your website on a public platform helped you improve your website to such an extent that you are now able to attract a bigger audience.

I wish I knew these things when I was first trying to create my website but thanks to the design community online who have helped me gain this knowledge.