Basic of building websites

Hi everyone!

Me and my brother want to build sites together. But I don’t think we understand the whole picture.

This is how we thought it would go:

I design the site, so i make sure everything is looking good. And then i give the design to my brother who ‘builds’ the site with coding etc. So everything works as a site and it isn’t just a ‘picture’ as i created it.

Hope to get some feedback on this.

Sincerely,
Luc and Niek

Hey @Luc_Van_Asten,

First, Welcome to Webflow and the Webflow community, there are plenty of great people in the community all willing to help.

You have described the basic high-level process for building a website. Essentially it’s a design and build.

Once a site is built, it needs to be hosted somewhere so that it can be accessed by others over the internet.

The complexity/confusion/skill comes from how you design/build and what tools you decide to use.

Design:
There are many design tools you could use - from pen and paper to desktop/online apps.
There will be a lot of information on what tools to use and which one is better etc (that can be an overload of information and therefore cause confusion as to which is ‘best’)

  • The answer? The tool that works best for you and how you think/design/work.

Build:
Again there are so many tools out there that could be used, and everyone is singing the praises of them as being the best or ‘next best thing’, you’ll be overloaded with information and just get confused.

The options with building a website range from manual coding to drag and drop website builders.
There are a lot of technical differences as to how the code is produced and what it looks like, and that’s where you’ll get most of the ‘debate’ around what’s best/secure etc (mainly from the ‘technical’ audience of the industry)

The great thing with Webflow is that you do not have to manually code anything (although you can add your own code if needed) and the code produced is very good code.

When building your site, you will need to have an appreciation as to how things hang together, this is especially true with Webflow. Webflow is not a ‘drag and drop’ Website Builder. Although you can ‘drag and drop’ the elements you want to use to construct your site, you actually need to understand what needs to be dragged where and why.

Hosting
Again too many options to mention and all of varying quality. (Very general rule of thumb - you get what you pay for). Hosting is a whole technical side in itself.
Webflow hosting is very fast, secure and easy to use.
Webflow hosting covers all the technical and security aspects of hosting a website, so oftentimes, if you are not sure of what you should be doing, the good option is to host your Webflow built site with Webflow hosting.

Sorry for such a long reply…like most things that involve design or tech, a simple question is not always a short answer.

Cheers
Keiran

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