How to Build a Website Simply, Quickly, and Well?
Content before colors. Here's my battle-tested approach to building websites that actually work.
Hey marketer! 👋🏻
One of the main things I’ve been doing for almost two decades is building websites. Today, I’d like to share my approach to web development with you. Over the years, I’ve simplified and systematized it so that even when working with a tight budget, the result is as good as it can possibly be.
After all, as a marketer or entrepreneur, sooner or later you’ll find yourself needing a (new) website. Whether it’s a microsite for a campaign or new company pages. And you won’t always have a team of specialists and a generous budget at your disposal.
Fortunately, we live in an era with plenty of tools that make the job easier. Building a website is no longer about programming - it’s primarily about assembling content.
Forget the Graphics, Start with Content
When people hear “new website,” many immediately start thinking about how the site should look. What colors will it have, where the logo goes, what animations to include.
Stop! That’s exactly the opposite approach from what you need.
A website is primarily a carrier of information. A site’s success rarely depends on its graphics. People don’t come to your website to admire it. They come for answers and solutions to their problems.
In my view, pages must work even in black and white, in a basic font.
When you have a well-built structure, perfectly described and photographed products or services, the website simply has to work. And whether it’s blue or red won’t dramatically increase your earnings. On the other hand, if you focus only on graphics and the content is garbage, the website will be useless.
Sure, make it look decent - aesthetically polished, suited to your industry and your visual identity. But that comes last.
Structure as the Foundation
The first step in creating a website should be building a mind map. In it, you’ll sketch out what pages the site will have and what content will be on each one.
For every page, note what information it should contain, what elements you want there (forms, galleries, testimonials...), and what action the visitor should take on that page. This gives you a clear initial picture of the project’s scope. This will guide the entire website creation process.
I use Xmind for this, which can be easily shared with your team or client.
Then Prepare Your Information
With your structure ready, it’s time to prepare the materials. At least the factual, rough ones. You need texts, photos, testimonials, contacts... basically everything that will make up the website’s content.
Try to prepare as much as possible right at the start. It doesn’t have to be final, polished copy. But you should have at least bullet points about what each section will cover. If you don’t have all the materials, at least note what will go there and roughly how much. Even amateur photos work if the professional ones are coming later.
A Quick Prototype Shows More Than Planning
Once you have your materials, you can start building. Thanks to tools like WordPress (I almost exclusively use the Divi theme), you can quickly assemble a functional prototype. I first install a clean WordPress with Divi, start creating the page structure, build the menu, and roughly drop in all the materials I have - without any styling whatsoever.
Don’t worry about graphics at this stage - the goal is for the information as a whole, and its arrangement, to make sense. The advantage is that with minimal effort, you see a real website, you can click through it and better imagine the final form. And you have room early on to reconsider or adjust things.
You can even test with real people whether the structure makes sense, whether important information is missing, whether the site is easy to navigate, and what length of text you’ll need where. It’s much easier to make changes at this stage than when you have finished graphics.
Fine-Tuning the Content
If everything is as you need it, it’s time to work on the final form of the content. Fill in the final versions of texts, upload the right photos, play with the wording of links and buttons, work on forms... Set preview images for articles. Basically, when someone browses through, they should see the content that’s actually supposed to be there.
When you think about it, websites like Apple, Notion, Basecamp, or Dropbox don’t actually have much graphics. They’re polished, with nice typography... but the rest is minimalist. They’re built on superb copy and refined photos. See how those colors don’t really impact the quality of the message?
Graphics as the Final Step
So only when you have confirmed and tested content should you dive into graphic adjustments. At this point, you know exactly what you’re styling - you know the text lengths, the number of images, the different types of content. You can either style directly on the website and create graphics “on the go,” or prepare a graphic design based on the development version and then style it accordingly.
Although I’m an advocate of the “content first” approach, this doesn’t mean the graphic design isn’t important. It’s like building a house - first you need a functional house you can live in, and then you can paint it and furnish it. A website must be visually attractive and professional in its final form. But this is the last step in the process.
That’s why even when a designer is working on the site, their brief should be the final version of the content. So they know what they’re designing. Otherwise, they’ll be designing blind - and possibly unnecessarily. Or you’ll end up trying to force-fit your content into a design that was created without context.
Why Does This Approach Work?
If you had a team of professionals, you’d do all of this anyway. Just separately. First research, structure, wireframe design and testing, then copywriting, graphic design, and finally programming the website based on that.
This way, with minimal time investment, you’re able to have a live prototype with rough content ready for testing. Thanks to current tools (no-code / low-code), the technical side of web development is much simpler than it used to be.
The real challenge is creating quality, functional content. And that’s exactly what you should focus on most when building a website. That’s where I see the main role of today’s marketer.
Your customers and website visitors ultimately won’t care what platform it runs on or how much it cost. They’ll care about whether they found what they were looking for. And whether you captured their attention.
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That’s my approach to building websites in a nutshell.
Looking forward to seeing you in the next article! ✌🏻
Jan Barborik
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