Real Web Design Tips To Help You Make A Better Website
A website’s success depends on its design. This is also true for a poor looking design and a website’s failure. When you create a site that is user-friendly and appealing it will help to ensure that visitors spend time on your site, return in the future, and refer friends. An amateurish website will drive people away without reading what you have to say. Heed the advice below to help you design an attractive and functional website.
Does your site pass the NoScript test? Firefox has a simple extension called NoScript that will perform the test. There are some elements (e.g. ordering products) that will not work if there is no script. For this reason, if your website is blank and has no scripts, it will not work.
Before you publish any web page, check it carefully for broken links. Visitors become frustrated easily when they click a link and find that it leads to the wrong place. You could check for broken links yourself, or get a program that scans and reports broken links for you.
Choose your color scheme wisely. Choose a font and color that will help your words stand out from the background. Dark text on a light background is the easiest for your visitor to read. If you aren’t sure if your color scheme works well, show it off to a friend for some feedback.
Creating a newsletter can help you get repeat visitors. Let your customers sign up for important events and updates so that they return to your site. You can incorporate a form in the sidebar of the site and track users that sign up. Make sure to only deliver the newsletter to people who have requested it!
Search Function
If you are creating a very big website, you want to always incorporate a search function into the site. Put in a search box in the right-hand corner up on top of the homepage, as this allows the site visitors to type in a single keyword that shows up anywhere on your site. FreeFind and Google can help you install a search function on your website.
Do not use a lot of graphics. You want the site to look professional and well-designed instead of cluttered. Use graphics for improvement, not decoration. Having the appropriate number of graphics that do not create clutter improves the usability of your website, too.
Use pictures on your site. Having pictures on your website gives off a more user-friendly approach to your site. People will spend more time on your site looking around when they see pictures they want to click on.
As you go about setting up your website, make sure that you add ALT tags to all images on the site. These tags help you describe the images for people with visual impairment or people that disable images. Using ALT tags also help to explain what clicking on the link will do. Lastly, search spiders use ALT tags, so this can help you in the SERPs.
Pay attention to the graphics you use. In general, JPEGs and GIFs are best for graphics. Although PNG and MBP files might be the better options for web graphics, they take up way too much disk space. Make your files manageable to keep loading times down for visitors.
Check for broken links before publishing your web page. Nothing is more frustrating to a visitor than clicking on a link and being taken to an error page. You can choose to use a link checking program or check your links by hand.
Text Content
Always use text content for links on your pages. The content makes the link visible to the users who are on your site. If your links don’t have text content, visitors might inadvertently click the link using a keyboard shortcut.
Test your site early and often. You have to be sure you’re working on how users interact and use your site while you’re designing the basic layout of it. Improve your site with every chance you get.
Pay close attention to the background of your pages. There are sites out there that use animated GIF images for their backgrounds. This might be OK for a personal site, but it can also be a serious distraction that makes it hard for readers to focus on the text. In order to preserve your website’s focus, and make it easy for your visitors to comprehend, you should choose a background image that harmonizes well with your site instead of clashing with it.
When creating your website, make separate CSS sets for different browsers and consider using conditional loading. This technique will make testing and maintenance easier. All sites require maintenance from time to time and making that easier will save you time.
The success of your site will depend in large measure on whether or not you have a visually appealing and functional web page design. The amount of traffic your site draws will be significantly greater if you use smart website design. Conversely, making poor web design choices will depress your site’s traffic and discourage repeat visitors. Use the website development guidance in this article in order to make sure your website succeeds.