Use your creative ability to design your own website. Really great web page design is in a class by itself, and will separate the business or interests it represents, from the rest of the pack. Knowledge is key to great web design. In order to further your knowledge base about designing websites, you should check out the tips discussed in this article.
One critical part of great web page design is ease of navigation. Important links should be highly visible on every page. Menus will make it a lot easier to navigate around your site. Ensure that there are links to all of your main pages, such as the home and contact pages, in a prominent location on every page.
Do not use a lot of graphics. You want the site to look professional and well-designed instead of cluttered. Never use graphics just to decorate, but only to improve. The right number of graphics improves look and functionality without crowding the page.
Don’t use lots of 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 be used to improve the site, not overdecorate it. Having the right amount of graphics will improve your site’s usability and reduce the clutter.
Have a simple front page. People surfing the web will quickly decide if they are going to delve into a website based on the front page. Be descriptive, but try to do so in just a few words.
Adding some relevant pictures is always a good way to make your site more interesting and attractive. Pictures help to break up a boring text-only website and give it a more user friendly vibe. Many people find pictures appealing and will spend more time on the site and looking at them.
Avoid having pop-up windows on your website. Most people will be turned off by a site that pop’s windows up in their face. Many visitors to your site may simply exit the site when faced with a pop-up. If this happens, they are unlikely to return.
Check your webpages for broken links before publishing them. A visitor will get very annoyed when they click on a link that takes them to either a blank page or one that gives them an error. Feel free to manually check them or use some programs to scan and report the broken links.
It is important to always make users needs a priority. Your focus should remain on the end user at all times. Interaction and ease of use are paramount concerns here. You must consider these aspects when designing websites. Try to look at your website design as if you were one of your users.
Meta Tags
If you want your website to get more visitors, take care to use relevant, up-to-date meta tags on every page of your site. Using relevant meta tags on each page of your site will help search engines categorize the page and show it to people who want to know about your page’s topic. If you use meta tags that do not correspond to your content or to your target audience, do not expect to get a lot of visitors.
Regardless of your target audience or what type of site you have, try to keep your loading time under ten seconds. It is best if the page fully loads in just a few seconds. Most online users crave instant gratification, so your success relies on providing it.
Test your site early and often. It is essential to do usability tests early in the developing phase. Be sure things keep getting worked on as you let your website get larger.
Create a comprehensive “About Us” page. There are a lot of websites that do not utilize compelling or original content for their “About Us” webpages. Try to make yours interesting! Give people an introduction to your own background, how you became interested in web page design, your inspirations, and what your business goals are.
Error Check
Make use of keyword research. While your main focus should always be on providing your customer with relevant and current information, you first need to work on gaining a customer base. Making use of keywords is what drives traffic to your site and makes it successful.
Perform a thorough error check of your site, including checking for broken links. Complete your error check before uploading your site and going live. This is necessary because when you have visitors come to your site they will find that the information they want to see is not available anymore and if this is to happen a lot on your site, they will leave. Check to be sure everything is working in order to avoid this.
You can learn from other web designers, but you should always remain creative and look for new ideas as you take your turn at design. Create your own features and use what you see on other sites as a base for your ideas. Following this advice with help you to become a talented web designer.
The use of tests concerning task based usability is good for your site. Basically, these tests determine if pieces of information on your website are working correctly. So ask multiple people in different location, using different browsers to give your website a visit; the task should be easy to complete. However, if it’s not, it will give you insight into what areas on your website need improvement.
Try pulling images into your post to maximize engagement. This makes your site more user-friendly. Many people find pictures appealing and will spend more time on the site and looking at them.
Include a search form on your home webpage, as well as on all your other pages. You make your site much easier to use and more accessible all in one shot with this search offering. These searches are easy to add — and worth the time.
Avoid using captchas except during user registration. While captchas may be useful in some cases, forcing them to do so for mundane tasks, will make them leave your site quickly. Most visitors will simply leave the website and use another resource instead.
If you use FileZilla, be certain that your username, proper port and domain are all programmed into its quick menu settings. This way, when you log back on to the server, all you need to do is select your personalized settings from the menu. You will save a lot of valuable time by doing this.
Ensure that you’re including a method of receiving feedback from your site’s visitors. That will allow you to fix any problems that you may not otherwise notice. Negative and positive feedback are useful in improving your website.
When you add videos to your site, remember that some people don’t have high bandwidth. You may want to stream at 5,000 kb/s, but only the fastest cable and fiber connections can handle that sort of bandwidth. This means that viewers are going to be starting at the “buffering” screen more than the actual video.
If your site contains a corporate logo, ensure that clicking it takes visitors back to the home page. Over the years most people have come to associate a logo with a link, that when clicked, will take them to the homepage of a website. It’s frustrating to click on a logo and have nothing happen, and this saves you from adding a ‘home’ link. A logo that is clickable makes your site simpler to navigate.
A well-designed webpage is a real thing of beauty, if you know what you’re doing. It’s pretty easy to distinguish excellent website design for terrible website creation, but it may be harder to articulate some of the subtle things that need to be learned to make a website great. The advice in the article above should help you become a better web designer.
Optimize your website of old versions of the IE browser. People seem to hate this browser, but many still use older versions. Workarounds are often necessary when standard elements can’t be rendered. An example would be the vexing “box model bug” which troubled IE for quite some time.