Designing a website is a simple as well as a complicated exercise; it all depends on what sort of website you're looking for. If it is a simple five-page website intended to showcase a very small business you can quickly fire up a free webpage creator, create a website and the navigation system and quickly upload the files to the remote server. Thousands of people are doing this on a daily basis.Professionally designed websites, on the other hand, go through a strenuous procedure to make sure that every part of the website contributes towards the bigger objective of the website because when large investments are made and huge revenues are expected even small things can create big shadows. That's why before getting down to designing a website -- whether you are an amateur quickly designing a website for you small business or you are a Web design company creating professional Web designs -- you need to follow time-tested procedures. Below I will quickly discuss 10 steps to designing your website.

1. Planning: Planning helps you make a list of what you want and what you don't want. It also helps you set your priorities straight so that you know where you have to go regarding the design of your website. While you are drawing the plan you will need to figure out what sort of audience you are going to target and for what search engines you will be optimizing your code. This depends a lot on what you are going to promote from your website. Planning will also let you know what sort of development platform you require for your website and what budget you will need for it.
2. Domain name: Your domain name should be commensurate with either the name of your website or the kind of service or product you are going to promote through it. Many people prefer to register a domain name representing their business instead of some esoteric name. For instance if you provide Web design services it is preferred that the phrase "Web design" appears some way or another in your domain name. After registering your domain name -- if you are using a third-party server -- you will need to change the name servers. The name servers will be provided to you by the hosting company.
3. Web hosting: Although you will need hosting when you have completely designed your website it is good to arrange hosting service beforehand because then you can keep testing the various pages that you design. Also once you decide to host your domain on a hosting server, when you change the name servers it will take anywhere between 48 to 72 hours to propagate the information over the Internet.
4. Website design structure: Before designing your website it is advisable that you create a design structure using some graphic tool. This way you will be able to create a visual image of how your website is eventually going to turn out. This will also help you organize your information according to the layout that you have in your mind.
5. Design and development: Once you have the structure, you can start creating the design of your website. You can either use some GUI or you can learn a bit of HTML and hand-code the layout. You can also use some free blogging or content management system software to create various pages. In fact once you have the basic layout you should apply that layout throughout the website and this can be achieved using CSS Web designing techniques. If you require some server side or client side coding you can do it in this planning phase.
6. Uploading the website: You need to upload your website to the remote host once you have completed designing it. You can use any of the freely available FTP clients to upload the complete website. You will need to get the FTP address from the hosting company.
7. Testing and debugging: No matter how smug you feel about your website the real test will occur when you have uploaded it. If there are some problems in the design that you've created or the code that you have written you can remove the creases here. Problems may crop up because there might be a different design and development environment on your PC and there could be a completely different environment on the hosting server.
8. Spelling and grammar checks: I am suggesting this check after you have uploaded your website because you may need help from someone else and once you have uploaded the website it is easier to access all the pages from anywhere in the world and hence anybody can conduct the spelling and grammar checks.
9. Browser compatibility: The compatibility issues with different browsers can be a big headache if you are not aware of them. Sometimes web designs don't look similar in various browsers. For instance a website may look stunning in Firefox, very mediocre in Opera, and totally collapse in Internet Explorer. You'll either need to carry out some workarounds or leave the features that are causing the conflict.
10. Backup: Having a backup is as important as uploading the website because by mistake if you spoil your new design or the server crashes all your hard work will go down the drain. So never rely on the backup facility provided by the hosting company; always have your own backup.