Many people have a casual interest in the creative field of website creation, but they get discouraged and bogged down when they start learning more about it. Don’t be intimidated by the whole process of designing web pages, but take a look at some tips and tricks here to get you going.
If you want your website to cater to the needs of visitors, it must be user-friendly and simple to navigate. You should have the links on your site prominently displayed and easy to navigate. Menus also lend to easy navigation. Make sure each page has a ‘home’ link.
Take the time to do keyword research. You definitely want to focus first on providing relevant content, but keywords should be planted appropriately to help you grow that customer base. Keywords are what search engines use to guide people to your website.
Make sure that a tagline is prominently displayed on your website. A tagline is seen as a statement that tells people what a business’s site is about. You only have about 10 seconds to gain and keep hold of your visitors’ attention from the time they first hit your site.
Free Software
Make use of free software in your site setup. Costly software is also available, but you can get good results with free tools since you are the main factor in the success of your site. A simple search is easy to do, and it produces a way for you to determine which free software and tools are best suited to your needs.
To work out the visual aspects of your site design, you can use a program like Photoshop to create mockups. Using a program like Photoshop can help amateur web designers create professional looking sites really fast. If you don’t have an easy-to-use tool like Photoshop, it will drastically increase the time and effort required to build a professional-looking website.
Ensure your site can pass the NoScript test. Download and run the NoScript extension on Firefox and find out if the site is readable? Some stuff won’t work unless there are scripts.
Put compelling, interesting information on your website. Design is certainly important, but the content is the reason that people will come back to your site. When you have relevant content on your site that appeals to your viewers and takes into account what they are looking for, there is a good chance they will want to visit again in the near future.
Be sure you’re using ALT tags for the images while you design a website. Tags such as these are key because for those who browse without graphics or who are vision problems, the tags provide descriptions of the images. In addition, ALT tags allow you to describe how a link behaves if you utilize your images as links. Lastly, ALT tags offer search engines a target that will help in boosting your rankings in searches.
Good websites are optimized for older IE browsers, like 7 and 8. People may say they dislike Internet Explorer, but a majority of them still use it. IE doesn’t render some modern design elements very well, so it may require a workaround. Specifically, you’ll want to know about IE’s “box model bug.”
Avoid using clashing, loud colors when designing your website. Your text should be easy to see against your background. The better choice is using darker fonts against backgrounds that are lighter. If you aren’t sure if your color scheme works well, show it off to a friend for some feedback.
Test your website on all the different web browsers. Every browser will interpret the site slightly differently. Some of the slight differences can cause navigation to be difficult for the user. A little bit of research will help you decide which browsers are used most often, at that time. Try your website out on various popular browsers. Since lots of people surf the Internet on their smartphones, look at your site through a mobile browser or two, also.
Create CSS pages and conditional loading when designing a website. You can do maintenance and testing much quicker and easier if these things are in place. This technique allows you to make changes to your website without a lot of work.
One great website creating program is Adobe Dreamweaver. This intuitive program is easy for anyone to use. You can do a lot of editing and testing on your local computer before uploading them to be live on your site.
Keep your site fresh and up-to-date, and promptly remove any outdated content. If your page is promoting a special event that happened 6 months ago, you have already lost readers. Users will spend time on websites that are well-maintained, and the presence of your outdated information will tell them that your site it not being properly cared for. Set a review schedule to update content and remove items that are no longer useful.
Content proofreading is important if you want to avoid mistakes. You want visitors to be able to navigate easily. A site with errors is not very professional and it will make people want to stay away from your site.
Knowing what website design requires, you should feel better about jumping into it. Don’t worry, you will never run out of knowledge you can obtain about the intricacies of website development. Once you put this knowledge to work, your website designs will be better than ever.