Are you interested in learning about web design? You are going to have an increasing amount of competition within your business niche concerning sites on the web. Check out the following article to see how you can create a great website that is the envy of your competition.
Be sure to select the correct graphics when designing your website. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don’t work well, PNGs work fine. For simple text buttons or graphics that aren’t photographs, use PNG for files that are 256 colors or larger. Use a GIF file for anything less than 256. JPEG files are best for photographs.
If users want to, let them cancel an action. An action can involve filling out forms, registering for email notifications or newsletters, or browsing the site for various topics or archives. If your visitors can’t easily change their mind and back out of registering for a site feature, they may feel forced to complete a transaction. This isn’t good for your web traffic or your reputation.
Keep your homepage simple. Those who are shopping the web will make snap decisions about a site based off its front page. Provide simple content on what you do and how to contact you.
Alt Tags
Use ALT tags on your images. These tags are used to describe the images they accompany in case the image is not displayed, such as when a user disables graphics or is visually impaired and uses transcription software to translate images and read them aloud. You can also optimize links further if the images you have are shown as links. Lastly, search spiders use ALT tags, so this can help you in the SERPs.
Your website should be optimized to include older versions of web browsers such as Internet Explorer. Although many people loathe Internet Explorer, many people surfing the Internet do it on older versions of this web browser. Workarounds are needed because the browser is not 100% compliant with standards. Familiarize yourself with the concept of the notorious “box model bug” which caused trouble for Internet Explorer for years.
Good meta tagging practices will help your website draw in larger numbers of visitors. Good meta tags help search engines understand and categorize your website’s content properly. Non descriptive or inaccurate meta tags will result in low visibility for your website.
Whatever file types you use for the graphics on your site go hand-in-hand with file size. This plays a major role in how fast your site loads. Generally, JPEGs and GIFs are the best graphics. While PNG and BMP files create crisper graphics, these types of files can take up significant disk space. Make your files manageable to keep loading times down for visitors.
Get in the habit of testing early and often. This will give your site great usability. Improve your site with every chance you get.
Always opt for fonts that area crisp and easy to read. You can make a pretty good judgment of a website’s professionalism simply by looking at its font selections. Skip the fancy fonts such as Comic Sans, since people may not be able to read them on many computers. If a person doesn’t have a font on their computer, the browser might render the site using the default font (generally Times New Roman). When the font defaults it can tend to make your webpage look much worse than it really is.
Don’t install pop-up adverts on your website. These ads are always alluring with the promise of making extra profits; however, most visitors find them highly annoying. Pop-ups will cause people to go elsewhere. Keep the ads you do use simple; you don’t need crazy pop-ups.
Build small sites at first, analyze what worked and what didn’t. As a starting point, try to design two or three basic pages that only contain text, and then work your way upwards from there.
Ask your friends what they know about website creation, in case there is something you’ve overlooked learning. It is important to verify that you have retained information before you are lost when building a site.
Target Audience
Figure out your site’s target audience and ask them what they’re interested in with a website. This assists you with your design process and in choosing features to include. Taking the advice of your target audience is crucial if you want your design to be successful.
Make sure to include a search function. This is very important for making the web site easy to use and accessible. Coding this search functionality isn’t difficult, so the increase in usability is definitely worth the time spent.
Site Design
It helps in the site design process if you continue to learn as you go. When you figure out some of the aspects related to site design, you need to try to tackle others that are new to you. This could slow down the process of site-building, but you’ll be rewarded with information that you need to create dozens of sites once you learn it.
If you are cultivating your website creation skills with an eye towards designing many sites at a professional level, it behooves you to learn how to use multiple platforms. Knowing MySQL, Java, PHI and more will benefit you in the future. Whether you intend to become a professional web designer, or you just want to do the best work you can for yourself and your friends, you should try to develop a diverse skill-set.
Website creation is something you should want to learn a lot about so you can beat your competition before they beat you. Use what you gained from this article, but be sure to always learn as much as you can about web page design to reach the level of success you seek.