Now matter if you run an online business or a blog, you must know how to make a great site. Web design is essential to determining its appeal to visitors and whether they’ll trust your content. This article will show you some great tips on designing a great website.
When you are creating graphics or photos for your website, be sure to keep the file size small. If your graphics are too large, your page will load slowly and your visitors will leave. You can find many free or inexpensive graphics programs online that will optimize your images before you load them to your website.
Use fixed-position navigation so your users can navigate your site with ease. This keeps the site menus in place as visitors scroll through your site. You can use this both to allow your visitor to navigate more easily, and to keep your call to action in view.
Make sure that your website has a tagline incorporated into the design. The tagline is some statement or motto that indicates the nature of your business. Having a tagline is important; most users know if they will stay on a page after about eight seconds, so you need to do whatever it takes to keep their attention.
Don’t pile on the graphics. Although graphics are necessary make your site project a professional, well-designed and cohesive look, having too many can make it look cluttered. Graphics should always be used to enhance the website, and not for decoration. Having the right amount of graphics that don’t clutter the design can improve the site’s usability, too.
To help new web designers make good sites, use Photoshop. Programs like Photoshop are great for new web designers, because it allows them to quickly create professional websites. Building a site from scratch can be overwhelming for amateur designers, so take advantage of design tools and programs that can do some of the heavy lifting for you.
Do not use images for your background. When you think about some of the biggest websites on the Internet, they do not have images as backgrounds. When you use image backgrounds, you represent yourself as someone who is not well-versed in web designing. Images as backgrounds also cause your site to load slower, which can lead to user frustration.
Organize your links and avoid putting too many links in one area of your site. Doing this can confuse visitors and make them leave your site. If you do have many low- to mid-importance links, emulate the “blogrolls” seen in many blogs and tuck them away in a column on the right side of the page.
Use breadcrumbs and make it so that clicking on the site logo returns you to the homepage. Breadcrumbs are markers that show where the visitor is in the site structure. For instance, the breadcrumbs might read “home > furniture > beds.” When the user clicks a link in the breadcrumbs, he can return to a page further up in the site hierarchy. Clicking on a business logo should generally take the visitor back to the homepage as well.
For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. Not only is this good for search engine optimization, but it is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible.
Be sure the websites you’re designing are cross-browser compatible. You must check your site in the most popular versions of every top browser. Some examples include Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Many users use these browsers for surfing online, so you need to be sure your designs are being seen correctly on whatever they use.
If you already have a particular web hosting solution that you know you are going to use, keep its limitations in mind as you design your website. For example, do not create a website that relies on specific programming languages if your web host does not support these languages. It is fairly simple to find out which technologies are supported by your web host. Make certain that your design is something that is within the limitations of your host.
Check your site for broken links. This should be done frequently, before uploading to the server. A visitor who comes across a broken link will question how dated all of the content on your site might be. So you don’t run into problems, make sure you check to see if everything works.
Never bite off more than you can chew by attempting to design multiple sites at once. You should keep things simple by only working on one site at a time. Even if you do have some web design skills, you may get crossed up with your projects, or one of your sites may suffer neglect. Just take things one at a time.
While development platforms aid you by creating code for you, they may not be as reliable as the original coding tool, the basic text editor. What a platform does is help you paste the code onto features that you have made. However, if you wish to ensure that the code is free of errors, and be directly involved in the process, utilizing a text editor is a better option.
Make sure that you periodically go back and try to remember all that you’ve learned thus far. One of the biggest problems people have when they first start out with web design is that they learn one or two things and forget them a couple of days later, which can hurt their website progress.
Before you begin creating your website, it can be beneficial to have your design laid out as a wire-frame image on your computer, or drawn out on a piece of paper. This will provide you with a reference that you can look back to as you begin implementing your ideas. It can be an effective organization tool, and additionally, can serve as a prototype to identify potential problems early on.
No matter what kind of website you are operating, it is crucial that you understand effective web design practices. Knowing what visitors find attractive and if they find your site trustworthy is part of website design. Follow these tips to design a great site.
