The first thing that people typically notice about sites that are on the Internet is their designs. Create a design that leaves a good first impression, or people will tend to leave your website quickly. These tips can help you prevent this outcome.
Fixed navigation panels are a good way to allow your visitors to easily navigate your site. This means locking the navigation panel when a person scrolls down a single page. You can use this both to allow your visitor to navigate more easily, and to keep your call to action in view.
If you’re designing a website, you need to look at your website in multiple browsers. Your content may show very differently to customers using alternate browsers. Make sure that your site is compatible with all popular browsers. Have a friend or colleague pull up your site in an alternate operating system to ensure their view is comparable to your own.
The graphics you use are important. Keep in mind that PNGs are much better than large and poorly working bitmap images. Use a GIF instead if the image contains over 256 colors and PNG for test buttons and screen shots. JPEG files are best for photographs.
Keep your topics separate. Be sure to use different pages if your site includes more than one topic for discussion. Not only will viewers be less confused, but search engines can pick up on your site easier, which gives you a higher ranking.
Search Boxes
A search engine is an absolute must if your website is larger than a few pages. People have become accustomed to search boxes being in the upper-right corner of the page, so put it there. These should let you at least search for one term, but it’s better if it allows multiple terms. You can get free search boxes from Google or FreeFind.
Make sure there is a prominent tagline on your site This lets people know about the site. Clear taglines are effective in potentially capturing the attention of a reader in the critical first few seconds they visit your site.
To make a more attractive website, try using your own pictures. Pictures on your website can provide a friendlier approach to visitors. Many people find pictures appealing and will spend more time on the site and looking at them.
You don’t want to be using frames when you are optimizing your website. Although users like pages that include frames, the information inside does not show up in search engines. If certain important information on your site cannot be seen by search engines, then you will not have a high ranking. Your traffic suffers if you fail to do this.
Alt Tags
Minimize your page sizes. Not everyone who uses the Internet enjoys speedy connections, so they are likely to lose interest if your site takes a long time to load. If the wait is too long, your visitors may give up and leave.
As you go about setting up your website, make sure that you add ALT tags to all images on the site. These tags are important because they describe the images people see when they don’t have their graphics turned on or they’re for people that can’t see and need help with getting a website read to them. In addition, ALT tags allow you to describe how a link behaves if you utilize your images as links. ALT tags are also used by crawlers and this can boost your ranking.
Your site should be optimized to handle older editions of Internet Explorer, such as IE7 and IE8. Lots of people grumble about IE, but they still use it, and they often use outdated versions. The older versions do not render all site elements to comply with web standards, which means using workarounds. Make sure you look at the very vexing “box model bug” that IE experienced.
Make sure that your user’s needs are a priority. Their needs should be your primary focus. How easy information can be accessed and the website use are critical. These are important considerations to make. View the site’s design from the potential visitors’ perspective.
It’s a good idea to set up your site so that it can retain a copy of user information that must be entered repeatedly. Saving data from one form to another, like username or email address, is imperative. This information retention and re-use makes site transactions much easier, and many people will appreciate that.
Good meta tags are a quick way to ensure your website makes it to a good rank on search engines. You need to spend some time on creating high quality meta tags so that search engines can classify your site properly. Non descriptive or inaccurate meta tags will result in low visibility for your website.
The design of a website is a huge factor in helping people decide if they are going to stay and look at your website, or move on to something different. You want to give off a good first impression. The tips found here should give you some ways to attract visitors. After that, you have give them a reason to stay.