Website development incorporates a large area of knowledge. You must carefully plan out your site, choose the right colors and borders for a great looking website. Use these tips to do a better job of facing this challenge.
It’s imperative that you include a tagline somewhere that will be very noticeable on your website. Your tagline lets others know more about you or your business. The tagline serves to entice people to linger at your website rather than just pass through. Research shows that visitors spend roughly 8 seconds deciding if a website is worth exploring further. So make your tagline count.
Keep finding fresh information all around you to boost your knowledge of website development. There is no end to the excellent websites on the Internet that offer free advice for the taking.
Be sure to use proper graphics when designing your website. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don’t work well, PNGs work fine. For screenshots, text buttons, and other non-photographic images, use PNG if the image has more than 256 colors, and GIF if not. For photos, you can use JPEG images.
A website that appeals to many is within your reach using the different types of programs available. They are easy to understand, and your website will be up and ready before you know it. Let’s face it, a boring, drab site simply drives traffic away and that is not what we want to do.
Do not utilize pop-ups. Everyone hates getting pop-up after pop-up on a website. It is not unusual for some people to refuse to stay on a website, and not return either, if it contains pop-up ads. Avoid annoying your customers, by staying away from these irritating advertisements. Is your host making you use pop-ups? Time for a new host.
Don’t lump all your topics together on one page. Put each topic on a different page. Your content will be more readable to your visitors and more visible to search engines, resulting in higher rankings.
Avoid using too many graphics. Graphics are indeed important to make your website look well-designed and professional, but if you use too many, it just looks cluttered. Your graphics should not only be decorative; they must also be true improvements. Having the right amount of graphics improves your website’s usability.
When you design a site, try to stick to just a few web fonts. Also think about how fonts look for different people. Small serif fonts like Times New Roman can be difficult to read on small screens. Verdana is a good font that is popular on the Internet.
Optimize your website for older IE versions. Many people are still using the older versions of Internet Explorer. They don’t render many elements in compliance with web standards, so workarounds are required. Do a little research on the box model bug.
Explore your website with different browsers and computer systems. Each web browser interprets websites slightly differently, and in some cases these differences can have drastic effects on the user experience. You can find more about which browsers are most in use and focus on them, so hunt down this information. Check your website on every one one of these browsers, and do not forget mobile web browsers that have become popular.
Minimize your page sizes. For customers with slower Internet speeds, a slow loading site can cause loss of interest. A visitor who has to wait a long time to see your information will move on.
Make sure to test early and to test quite often. Perform usability tests in the early stages of designing your website. That will allow you to make necessary design changes during the build process.
While you design the site, remember that it is not necessary to fill every square inch of your site with content. Filling every last pixel of available space can produce a cluttered effect your visitors may find overwhelming. When you space things out in an appropriate way and have a sense of organization, this will make users feel like they are in control. Sometimes, empty space is underrated.
Don’t assume that you have to make use of every last inch in your website layout. Using plenty of blank or “white” space is a common design strategy, and a very effective one. Eliminating clutter will let your customers have an easier experience in navigating your website, and will let them relax and enjoy the experience.
Check for broken links before publishing a page. An error page after clicking a link is very frustrating for visitors to your page. You can either check links manually, or use a program that will scan the website for you to report links that are broken.
The more often you check the site, the faster you can delete spam or negative contents. This one is especially important for bloggers and forum owners. Being a good designer means you keep the negative off your site.
Stay away from using Flash with your website. Flash does allow for all sorts of imaginative content, but some visitors will have a poor experience if their machine or connection is not capable of handling the resources being passed to them. On top of this, some mobile devices and tablet computers lack an installation Flash software and there is also an ongoing standardization of open software that performs the same tasks that Flash traditionally has done, an example being HTML5 video.
User friendly and consistent interface tools are essential. Make all underlined text clickable and use different colors for already clicked links. If your website is easy to use and consistent on each page, people will likely stay on your page longer, and they may visit the site more.
Set up your website so that people can easily search it. This is especially important if you have a large website. Place a search box in the top right corner on the home page where users can search for a term that may appear on your site. If you can’t code one yourself, Google and a few other websites offer free search functionality for websites with no programming required.
Your site logo should link back to the home page of your site. It is common these days for sites to have a logo or image that visitors can click on to return to the home page. If your logo isn’t “clickable”, that frustrates users, because they have to look around the site for the “home” link. This will make your site more seamless to navigate.
Each page on your website should have your logo on the top. This gives a coherency to each your web pages. Also, this will build brand recognition for your site. Choose a logo which represents what your company stands for.
Take advantage of free stock images in your web design. You can find these images across the Internet, and some are very high quality. This will allow you to focus your funds on other site elements.
Adobe Photoshop is a valuable software program for any dedicated web designer. When amateurs use Photoshop, they often create very professional grade sites based off the capabilities of the software. If you do not have a top program like Photoshop, it can make it hard and really time consuming to acquire enough knowledge to build a really nice site, quickly.
The general idea here is to get the gist of web design, not to become a pro overnight. Once you begin to learn the different tactics available, you will start to understand the core concepts involved with website design and start translating this knowledge into features on your website. Check back with this site if you have any trouble.