Designing your own website is key in promoting yourself or your business online. An easy-to-navigate, attractive site design can tell the audience that you’re trustworthy, a niche expert, and a professional. Your first step is to learn what you need to do to accomplish this, so keep reading for some great advice.
A business website should always be one that is easy to navigate. Links need to be prominent and simple to find. You can also improve your website’s navigation by using simple menus. Visitors will also be able to get around better if every sub-page has links back to your site’s primary pages.
Unless your website can be viewed on a variety of browsers, it is unlikely to produce the desired results. Ensure that the site can be easily navigated on the most popular browsers. While a certain element may look wonderful in Firefox, it may appear incorrectly on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Safari. Before you set your site to go live, look at how every page shows up in all the major browsers.
You want to keep the website page size minimal. If your site takes awhile to load, your visitors will lose interest. If the wait is too long, your visitors may give up and leave.
Never use pop-ups. Few things are worse than being overloaded with pop-ups. Even large, popular websites can lose visitors by mistakenly employing pop-up ads. Avoid using these irritating ads to keep your visitors happy. If your webhost places their own popup ads on your website, it is time for you to change your webhost.
Try the common “newsletter” technique to keep your readers reminded of your services. Let your customers sign up for important events and updates so that they return to your site. Place the form for signup in a sidebar or at the top of the pages in your site, and track those who sign up. Only send the newsletter to those who request it, or you could find yourself in hot water.
Before you start promoting your site, test it on several different browsers. Different internet browsers can display the contents of your website differently, which can sometimes dramatically alter a visitor’s experience. There are a ton of resources you could use, so you are able to find out the browsers that currently have the most popularity. Test your website on all of these browsers, including the popular mobile web browsers.
Use fonts that are both easy to read, and professional. The most well-designed sites use professional-looking fonts. Some fonts, such as comic sans, are ones that you want to stay away from. 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). This will inevitably come off looking bad.
Buy books about website development so that you can maximize your education, and become as successful as possible. Look for books that are aimed at your level of expertise, so that you do not miss out on any important information.
Website Design
Adobe Photoshop is widely-known, and a lot of people are sure that becoming familiar with the program is vital to, if not entirely synonymous with, successful website design. Strangely, Photoshop’s companion program, Dreamweaver, is far less known, even though it is a purpose-built tool for website design. The many potential benefits Dreamweaver can offer you make it well worth investigating.
Get a professional mentor. Even if you want to tackle most of the site building yourself, having professional advice can greatly ease the process. You’ll rapidly advance your knowledge of design this way.
Give your website’s visitors the capability to search your website, at least on your main page and ideally on every sub-page. 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.
You can see if your website is interesting by checking the statistics of it. This lets your know your visitor’s demographics and tastes. This will help you make better design decisions moving forward.
Make sure you work on your design every day for a few hours. It’s important to block out large chunks of time, so that you don’t fall into the trap of just dabbling in website design. Working hard creates focus, which means that you will create a better site and therefore improve your profit margin.
If your website is a commercial website, your best option is to avoid free web hosts. Although it may be tempting because it’s free, some of these free hosts will place all kinds of third-party ads that you can’t control. This cramps the style of your site, and is often viewed unfavorably by site visitors.
Validation Service
Take the time to validate every page you design. Most popular WYSIWYG editors don’t generate code that is even remotely close to being valid. Use a validation service to check your code if you use this type of editor. One free validation service can be found by visiting the site of the Consortium, which sets standards for the Web, known as the W3C.
The first step was learning to build the site, and now step two is working to create your design. Use the tips you have read here to aid you as you begin constructing your website. Keep learning and driving up your traffic, and your site will be successful in no time!