Creating an individual identity online is a pretty complicated process. It involves many aspects essential to create, launch and run a website successfully.

Here’s a list of six most crucial Do’s you must consider before you begin.

1. A product or a service to offer:

Two things that have always been, are being and will be SOLD in this ever changing competitive world are goods and services according to the end user’s requirement.

The only question you should be asking yourself before creating any online asset is – Are you capable of providing any of these? If yes, its time to get it online.

2. A Domain Name:

Naming a website can be a tedious task and must not be carried out in haste. When you think of creating a website for yourself, you certainly want your content to reach out to the relevant traffic worldwide and a substantial role in it is played by website’s name because it is the identity and the foremost impression of your brand under which your product or service will be sold or shared. A large number of websites such as GoDaddy or BlueHost provide domain services at reasonable costs. You might have to try different names as the one you already have in mind may not be available. But before you begin the domain search, put yourself in place of the end user or website visitor and make sure the name is:

• Easy to remember (Personally, I believe in avoiding any fancy modification of an original word which makes it hard for users to memorize the spellings)
• Between 8 to 14 characters long
• Unique
• Brief yet comprehensively clarifies about your work
• Same as your website’s name/title

3. A site plan:

After you have come up with an idea of selling, promoting or sharing a particular product or service and a unique name for your web presence, you should construct a plan that will demonstrate just the broader outlook of how your site will function or what pages will it contain? Make a chart for it if possible. It is always advantageous to plan your site rather than diving straight into a design application.

4. Content – Be Genuine:

Always take some time in order to collect and create content related to the product or service you are going to offer. Being genuine is the most important aspect of it. Take a pen and a pad and start writing. It may take days or even months in some cases, but this will help making the design process a lot easier because you will then just have to copy, paste and manipulate it in accordance with your needs.

5. Website design software:

Now you should start exploring and scrutinizing the wide spectrum of your mind’s creativity in order to get things done just the way you want them to be. Here you will be playing with fonts, colors, graphics and all those animations which you see on most websites today. And the application that you will need to assist you in this process is Adobe Muse.

6. Everlasting ‘never give up’ spirit:

You’ll definitely be seeing a number of websites in your industry/niche which you will think are better than yours in terms of almost everything. But remember, on the web, you can always find audience for your kind of thing. The key to success is just to keep moving and never giving up.

WHY MUSE?

As aforementioned, setting up a potential existence on the internet is a backbreaking job, if not Herculean. However, selecting an appropriate application for it comes even beforehand for the reason that you’ll invest time, money and headwork in building that existence. If unfortunately, desired result is not achieved, you’ll either quit or switch to another program. I’ve been through such times and believe me, it’s really distressing. One tool that has always prompted me to stick to web design is Adobe Muse as it contains and associates with all the imperative elements I need for creating, publishing and managing a website. Here are a few out of many reasons which might drive you to pick it as your first or next site building software.

1. Preeminently for Designers:

Until the last few years, building a website on their own had become a ball and chain for designers as it demanded coding and programming skill set. However, a tremendous growth in the urge of having online presence for every small and large business across the globe has latterly given rise to a large number of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ tools which have presented designers with an opportunity to explore the web design sector. But most of them are either expensive or not durable.

Adobe Muse, on the other hand, is a cost-effective and dependable solution. It has proven to be conducive in producing stable, visually appealing and flawless websites without coding. Some of the noteworthy features include:

• Adobe Typekit and Web Fonts: Choose from a variety of available fonts – sans, serifs, scripts, fixed-width, thick, handmade and decorative. Muse also recommends fonts suitable for headings and paragraphs.
• Assets: With creative cloud membership, Adobe offers a huge collection of free vectors, icons and patterns which, when used with Muse, add grace to the look and feel of a website.
• Errorless designing: Every website, big or small, contains a lot of content such as text, images, buttons and widgets, forms, slideshows etc. Even if the website has been created, there arises a need to format or edit some of the elements which, if not done carefully, might result in application of formatting to wrong objects and can ruin the design. Two features namely ‘current selection area’ and ‘hint label’ serve the purpose of making the design process smooth and eliminate incidental errors.
• Layers and Guides: As the layout grows, so does the complexity. Under such circumstances, Layers feature helps to put the content in order and to re-organize or re-stack the objects. Also, guides are used to align the objects at equal spacing and to assign areas to header and footer of the site.

You might want to take a look at Adobe Muse Site of the Day page where you’ll find examples of exceptionally fine website designs created with this tool by designers from various parts of the world.

2. Built-in Progressive Workflow:

Majority of website design applications overwhelm the designers by offering zillion functions which eventually becomes exhausting especially when one doesn’t know where to begin. On the contrary, facilitating the design process has always been Muse’s principal concern. The interface and workflow of this software is such that all the essential elements a designer could possibly need to build a website are organized and visible at once, right in front and nothing is hidden. It has five modes as follows which are pivotal in stepwise progression of the site.

• Plan: This is where you can create site’s framework or site map by adding pages.
• Design: A designer invests major portion of time here in adding, moving or altering the content and assets.
• Preview: This is another outstanding feature of Adobe Muse for previewing the designed draft without actually exporting the code to html.
• Publish: This is where you can publish your site to a FTP host, adobe’s business catalyst or export it as html.
• Manage: This is where you can check and control the data related to live website such as its views and traffic analytics, hosting etc.

3. What You See Is What You Get:

Most of the times, web design beginners get carried away by the phrase “create websites without coding” and they do not consider focusing on technical aspects – whether the application they are going to choose is capable of delivering the look and performance they desire in their website. Sooner or later, due to continuous unsatisfactory results, they end up squandering the valuable resources, as I once did. However, this snipe hunt of mine ended with Adobe Muse which is, in actuality, a true WYSIWYG tool. They affirm it and they do it right. For accurate preview of the designed layout, Muse has incorporated a WebKit rendering engine. The one which is used by major web browsers such as Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Apart from this, a designer also has an option to export the site as html in order to test the finished draft across different browsers and operating systems.

Yet another impressive feature in terms of previewing the site is the ‘preview page in browser’ feature. When you have a large number of pages on your website, it becomes a bit weary to export the whole site (as it takes longer) just to see if the objects on a particular page are rendering correctly. This is where page preview is used to save time.

All in all, site building with Muse ensures that the end users or visitors will see the exact same appearance and behavior of the website as you’ve designed it.

4. Responsive and SEO:

As more and more people have started using mobiles and tablets to access the internet, it has become indispensable for web designers to create responsive layouts for enhancing user experience across multiple devices and screen sizes. Google has decided to penalize those websites which are not configured for such devices and to boost the ranking of those which do. And luckily, Muse has been updated to these changing usage patterns with the introduction of two most significant features namely ‘Breakpoints’ and ‘Scrubber’. Once you’re done with the initial desktop layout, simply move the scrubber to a lower screen size at which the design starts to break or looks erroneous. Add a breakpoint at this position, adjust the design elements as you intend for that screen size and continue dragging the scrubber until the design breaks again. Repeat this process till you have your design for the smallest commonly used screen width which is 320 pixels. It’s as simple as that.

Moving on to Search Engine Optimization, in simple words, it is a channel that takes your website from your computer’s hard drive to a number of viewers worldwide looking for content just like yours. Out of tones of white-hat methods that can be implemented in order to acquire traffic on a website, Muse takes care of few of the most important ones namely metadata, level tags for text and alternative text for images.

5. Business Catalyst and E-Commerce Integration:

Although, Muse is comprised of a wide range of instrumental features, still there are some components which, at this point of time, cannot be created using this tool such as blogs and customer database. It also has a limitation in setting up an online store as it currently offers PayPal system only. Due to this, Muse is regarded as a front-end application.

However, this doesn’t mean that all these essentials will not be achieved if you’ll choose Muse. There is a powerful, all-in-one solution that caters for this purpose.

• Adobe Business Catalyst: It’s an online platform that practically makes Muse limitless. Whether you are a small business or large or just starting out or want to create a website for your client, it offers different pricing plans to choose from. You can:
  • Seamlessly integrate it with Muse to publish or host your Muse site onto a secure FTP server using custom domain.
  • Create blogs, forums and mailing lists.
  • Easily manage content and user database.
  • Establish a full-fledged online store and manage payments and shipping options.
  • Regulate back-end operations on your own without writing or editing code.
• Other Widgets: If you don’t want to use Business catalyst for your eCommerce needs, you can opt for other widgets such as Shopify, Ecwid, Sellfy and Selz which, when combined with Muse, prove to be efficient and extract exceptional outcomes.

Conclusion

I believe it doesn’t necessarily mean for an idea or perception to live up to your expectations or vision as it has for others. Ballooning your skills in any field requires extensive research and experimentation. My recommendation to you is to compare Adobe Muse with other web design applications in terms of pricing, features and control over design and decide whether it is a good fit for you. Thank You.