Do you hope to one day have a successful career as web designer? Then you better learn all you can about the field, starting with this article.
Consider having your website use fixed-position navigation. This means that when the visitor goes down your page, the navigation panel will be locked. This is good for visitors, but also for internet marketing professionals, because it helps facilitate the desired action.
Speed is vital when it comes to the Internet; therefore, you should ensure that your pages load really fast. If your visitors are waiting forever while something is loading on your site, there is a good chance they will quickly leave and never return.
Check your site in all of the different browsers. What you see on your screen may be different from what others see. You want to know about the different popular browsers and approach web design accordingly. It’s also a good idea to send your website to someone who’s using another operating system in order to see if their browser and yours are compatible.
Don’t make your page sizes any larger than necessary. Users with slower Internet connections may decide that the wait is not worth it if your site is slow to load. You don’t want your visitors waiting for each page to load because they may just end up leaving.
Make it easy for visitors to back out of a process if they change their minds. Actions include registering for any e-mail notifications, browsing the site, or filling out forms. Forcing your user to complete an action they don’t wish to will ensure they never sign up for anything on your site again, nor are they likely to return at all.
One tool amateur web designers should use when creating graphics for their sites is Adobe Photoshop. Using programs like PS can make amateur sites look professional, fast. By not having a program like this, you will be at a disadvantage because making a beautiful website design from scratch takes a lot of time and knowledge.
If you want your website to attract many visitors, it must be simple to navigate. It should always be easy to get from one page of the site to another. Menus can also make it easier to navigate your site. Post links that lead back to the homepage on each page of your website to make navigation easier for your users.
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To create a site that is well optimized for most search engines, don’t use frames. Website visitors like framed pages, but the information isn’t easily viewed by the search engines. Your website won’t rank high if the information isn’t visible. This can hinder any new visitors.
During the process of designing your site, use ALT tags for your images. There are a few core reasons why ALT tags should be used, including helping the visually impaired, providing indexing possibilities for the search engines and also for description and translation purposes. In addition, if the image is a also a link, you can tell visitors where the link takes them and what it does. Finally, ALT tags are used by search engine crawlers; therefore, using them can help boost your search rank.
Smaller pages are better. Some users have slower connections and will lose interest if a website takes too long to load. You don’t want your visitors to wait for a page to load.
Optimize your website to handle computers that may be running older versions of programs like Internet Explorer 7 and 8. While it is often viewed as a sub par browser, a large number of users are still using old versions of this browser. Unfortunately, many aspects of your site may not be compatible or displayed properly due to outdated rendering standards, so you may have to create some fixes for the elements that do not work properly. Specifically, you should learn about a “box model bug” which troubled Internet Explorer for years.
Now that you’ve read this, you should feel less intimidated by website design. You probably aren’t as confused as when you first started out because the article here gave you great advice you can use to help you design great looking websites.