Just because you can navigate a website, it doesn’t mean you can build one. It takes some skill to design a site. To achieve a great website design, you should educate yourself on the principles of building one. Make sure to read these design tips below if you need a hand.
A tagline can be very beneficial for your site. The tagline includes a motto or clever phrase that speaks to the purpose of your business. There are about eight crucial seconds to grab and keep a visitor’s attention, so having an easy-to-understand tagline is crucial.
Watch for new ideas on forums dedicated to web page design if you want a head start, or simply to learn more. Use your preferred search engine to get sound information that will help you learn for free.
In order for your site to bring in visitors, its navigation must be intuitive. You should have the links on your site prominently displayed and easy to navigate. Menus will make it a lot easier to navigate around your site. Link back to the homepage from every other page on your site; this makes it far easier for users to get around.
Incorporate a search function that lets visitors find what they need. Visitors may look for something specific, and that box will be the one of the first things they look for. They may go to another site if you don’t have one. Always put the search box on the page’s upper right corner, since this is where visitors usually look first.
Search Box
If you’re creating a large site, include search functions for your visitors. The best place to put your search box is on the top of your homepage. Shoot for the upper right corner. Users often expect to see a search box in this area and may want to search your site for the information they are looking for. You can find viable search features through companies like FreeFind or Google.
Good websites are optimized for older IE browsers, like 7 and 8. The Internet community loves to hate on IE, but in truth, a large portion of Internet traffic still happens through IE. This creates problems for web designers, but there are things that can be done. For instance, IE has suffered a “box model bug” for multiple years.
Pay attention to the graphics you use. GIF’s are much easier to utilize on your site. PNG and BMP files offer advantages for web graphics, but the file sizes are too much for internet load times. Make your files manageable to keep loading times down for visitors.
Test your site on multiple browsers, platforms (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc.) and devices (Mac, PC, tablets, cell phones, etc.) No two browsers will display your website exactly the same, and some of them could make it more difficult, or even impossible, to use easily. You can do a little research to find out what the popular browsers are. Check how your site behaves on all the major browsers for both PCs and mobile devices.
While development platforms are great for doing the job of creating your code, they are not always able to be relied on for classic text editing. The reason for a platform is to design all the features of the site, so that you can then paste the code that is generated. However, if you wish to ensure that the code is free of errors, and be directly involved in the process, utilizing a text editor is a better option.
When you know about website design, get down to practicing what you know. You want all these new techniques to become second nature to you. You don’t need to think that you’ve leaned something only to find out that you didn’t fully grasp it.
There are newsletters that you can sign up for, which will keep you informed about web designing. These are good to get you back on track if you lose sight of your goals, and motivate you to get on the right path. Newsletters are available to offer advices for site designers of all skill levels.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to create the whole website alone. There are many different components to the website development process, including artwork, user experience, server-side programming, content writing, and optimizing for search engines. So, don’t be ashamed to ask for help if you need some. You can hire a professional to help you with any areas that you do not know well.
Now that you have read these tips, you should see that it is not hard to design your own website. It is a special kind of skill, so you need proper guidance on how to better it. Apply all of the tips that you learned here towards your page.