Web sites are one of the most effective marketing tools any business or individual can use to reach the masses with their messages, products or services. Web design can be a fairly expensive process though and doing it yourself has always been the realm of professional designers and developers. This is no longer the case though with the range of web design tools available to those who want to know how to design a website but have no programming skills.

Before we look at these applications lets have a quick look at what a web site is and how it works. Web sites are basically no more than documents that contain all the text, graphics, flash animation objects, and links that you see on any website you open.

These documents are stored on the servers (computers) of the relevant Hosting company such as Bluehost or SBI, both of which are great hosting compaines. So if your website is hosted by Bluehost your web document with all the relevant goodies lives on Bluehost servers.

A website needs a domain name which is no more than an address for your web document. This consists of a numerical identifier and a name that you choose. This name should ideally contain some strong reference to what your site is all about as it is one of the most powerful “map points” that attract traffic, or people browsing the net, to your site. So a domain name of lawnmowers.com is not going to be very effective if your site deals with carpet shampoo.

The content or text on your site is the other powerful business magnet in your web document. If this text contains many relevant “key words” such as carpet, carpet shampoo, carpet cleaning etc than the mechanisms (search engines) that allow potential customers to find you will be able to do so easily.

Just remember, the net is a very densely populated place and you want people to find your carpet shampoo before they discover the competition so SEO (How to Optimize a website) is an important part of structuring your web content.

Now this is all usually driven by blocks of HTML (hyper text markup language) code which is a scary way of saying a programming language that all web browsers understand. Normally you would have to have at least a working knowledge of HTML coding to build a website. This has changed though and with the advent of programs such as Adobe Dreamweaver, FrontPage and GoLive which make the job far easier.

Both Bluehost or SBI for example offer tools and automated systems that build the site for you so you can focus on creating your content and your business. Both of them make building a website so easy that you will be left wondering why you didn’t do it long ago.

These systems use drag and drop protocols that allow you to simply create a design custom to your business. It will automatically generate all the necessary HTML code in the background for you. SBI for example goes as far as optimizing each page for you.

Web site design is a huge subject that would require a novel style instruction manual, but the good news is that with these website hosting companies these days, even a total novice with no knowledge of how to design a website can get the job done just fine. You may not have the raw power and flexibility to build a site from scratch, but you can still get a result that looks great and is optimized.