Technical needs

When looking at a website, you need to be aware of some technical parts of the process and upkeep. If you're not very confident about this side of things, you might feel concerned about making decisions. If you're working with an external company, you can ask them to explain anything you're not sure of. Make sure you understand how you'll keep your website up to date with any changes - it will be much easier and quicker if you can fix any basic errors or add in information by yourself.

The 'back end' of your website

There are a range of different tools and platforms to help you build your website and manage your content. These are normally called a content management system, or CMS. For a simple site, you could use a site-building tool like Squarespace. These tools are fairly intuitive to use and can help you quickly generate a range of layouts. However they may lack some of the publishing features and customisation you might want on a more complex site. 

For medium and larger sites, WordPress is a very popular option, with over 40% of sites globally running on this platform. WordPress started as a blogging platform but has now become a very capable publishing platform capable of handling a wide range of page types. Because it is so widely used, it is easy to get external support on sites built with WordPress. 

You can use Wordpress.com for a commercial, hosted setup which is fairly easy to use. Or you can use the Wordpress.org framework. This allows you to manage (and potentially save) costs a bit more, and you can customise the setup more easily than with the .com version. However, you will need more technical skills and you will be responsible for arranging your own hosting and security updates. 

Other popular website publishing platforms include Drupal and Joomla. These tools offer more customisation options and can be scaled to accommodate large amounts of traffic or complex content types. But they are more complex for site contributors and editors to work with. 

Accessibility

It’s really important to make sure your website is accessible to all users. Building in accessible design features like responsive page design and clearly-structured content will help all visitors to your website, not just people with particular accessibility needs. Website accessibility is a topic in its own right, but here are some key points: 

• use responsive, mobile-friendly page templates. These will easily scale to a range of screen sizes while ensuring that text remains easy to read
• use responsive, mobile-friendly page templates. These will easily scale to a range of screen sizes while ensuring that text remains easy to read
• have a clear navigation system with menu items accessible on a range of devices 
• have clearly structured content, using heading levels and introductory text to help readers understand the structure of your pages .

Don’t:

• use PDFs for core content – convert it into a well-structured web page so that it is accessible without opening or downloading a PDF file 
• use low contrast colour combinations, flashing content or too many images – these can make your site content hard to read.