As an alternative to outsourcing your site design, learn the skills yourself and make it your business to assist others with their site design. Web page design is easy to learn, even if the results look complicated. Follow these tips to see just how simple it all is.
Feature a prominent tagline on your site. This will let people know what your business represents. A clear tagline lets the reader quickly to see what the site is about, since most people make a decision to stay or go usually within 8 seconds.
Always give viewers the option to cancel a current action. This could mean ordering products, opting in to an email newsletter, or returning to the homepage from deep within your site. Visitors with second thoughts are not going to appreciate being locked into an action. They will feel that they are being forced to act against their wishes, and it will be unlikely that they will want to return to your site after such an experience.
Create an easily scannable website. Usability tests have determined that the majority of online visitors aren’t going to read all content but instead scan for something interesting. Using bolding, color changes and breaks between sections of text makes your content easier to scan and makes it more likely that visitors will return. Also, make sure to keep the most important information at the top. This helps the visitors see the important stuff first before checking out the rest of the site.
Regular Basis
Refrain from the overuse of Javascript. Some of your website visitors may not have JavaScript, and others will not want to update it on a regular basis. All web browsers vary, and each one releases new versions on a regular basis. Many of your viewers won’t have the most up to date version of the web browser they use. You should also be aware that some of your users will have JavaScript disabled through their browser. In either case, you are preventing your visitors from using all or some of the features of your website.
A search engine is an absolute must if your website is larger than a few pages. The best place to put your search text box is in the top right hand corner as that is where the bulk of websites put theirs. You can find search functions to use for your site on sites like Google.
You must be sure that your site is optimized properly so that it can be viewed in all browsers. Lots of people grumble about IE, but they still use it, and they often use outdated versions. You will have to use workarounds when dealing with this issue, so keep that in mind. Read up on the so-called “box model bug” which has bothered IE users for a long time.
User experience is the most important aspect of any website. The web designer needs to be focused on the end user’s needs at all times. These needs include user interaction, accessibility, and user experience. These are really important to think about when working on a website. Try to see things from your visitor’s perspective when you design.
Optimize your website to ensure fast load times. People are more likely to leave your site if the load time is too long. Some effective ideas include using SSI files, making the most of your HTML, making expire headings, getting rid of excess script, Flash, and graphics and keeping CSS and JS coding to a minimum.
When designing a website, use independent CSS pages and conditional loading. The application of these two techniques make website testing and maintenance both less time-consuming in the future. All websites need to be maintained at some point, and you want it to be as simple as possible so you can easily make changes.
Do not place adds that pop up on your site. These are annoying to your users and they are less likely to trust your site. People won’t want to return to your site. Keep ads small and unobtrusive.
It’s all right to rely on a host for tools to set up your basic design, but to add more advanced touches, you’ll want to do some of your own work. Going beyond templates means you’ll have a website that stands out, offers your visitors content they’ll come back for and gives you greater profits.
User-friendly website creation programs, known as development platforms, can make building websites easier, but they are just not as trustworthy as hand-written code. What a platform does is help you paste the code onto features that you have made. Even if you do use one of these editors, make sure to check your code in a text editor afterward to clean up erroneous or extraneous code.
Because there is some coding involved with website design, it is often thought of as difficult. As you can see now, there isn’t that much to it. Just follow these tips and you should not have trouble with the design of the site.