Don’t Design Another Website Without Reading This!

By Jei Kei  On  In Web Design Tagged , ,  

Many people get involved with website creation without knowing any of the important techniques. Use the following suggestions as to what is involved with a successful website.

Speed is king when it comes to webpages, so be sure that your images are loading quickly. If someone has to wait while your site loads, there’s a chance they will get impatient and go to another site, and they might not visit your site again.

Use fixed-position navigation so your users can navigate easily. This keeps the site’s panel for navigation in a place as visitors scroll through your site.

Don’t make page sizes any larger than necessary.Users with slower Internet connections might decide that the wait is not worth it if your site is slow to load. You will want your visitors to wait for a great overall experience.

Be sure that your website has small files, no matter how aesthetically designed your site is. This is because the size of your website’s files directly affects its loading time. You want your website to load quickly so visitors won’t lose patience with it. You should remember also that some visitors may not use an Internet connection that is high speed. Continue to test your site to make sure it will load quickly, even with a dial-up connection.

TIP! Use ALT tags on your images. These tags provide several very important functions in that they describe images for people who browse the Internet with graphics disabled, and provide descriptions for people who are visually impaired and utilize tools that translate images to voice.

While it is useful in delivering a more interactive experience, a lot of Internet surfers are going to have difficulty with it. Each web browser is different, and your visitors will be using many different versions of each software platform. Not everyone will upgrade to the most current version of his browser. These two factors can prevent users from making use of your site.

Make sure that your page loads quickly. A good site will show up on a visitor’s eyes within moments. Most visitors want instant gratification, so it is best that your website provides it.

It’s vital that you test your web designs on multiple browsers. Different browsers will read and display a site in different ways, which can have some unintended results for site visitors. There are a ton of resources you could use, so you are able to find out the browsers that currently have the most popularity. Make sure to beta-test your site on all popular browsers, including those used on mobile devices.

TIP! Make sure to test early and to test quite often. Perform usability tests in the early stages of designing your website.

Make your first page very simple. People looking around decide quickly whether to use your site or continue searching by how your homepage looks. Be descriptive when you talk about your business and what you offer that is unique, but try to do so in just a few words.

Make sure your website content grabbing to readers. The overall design is always important, and the content is too.

Website counters are pretty unattractive, so stay away from them. You might think they are a valuable addition to your site, but nothing could be further from the truth. Ditch the counter and use tracking software instead.

Text Content

Always provide text content for links on your website. This will let your visitors where they are going to click on the links. If you have links that have no text content, they may appear as a keyboard shortcut.

Consult with friends and those in the know, if you missed something when you were learning about HTML, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. You need to be sure that the information you have is ingrained and you don’t need to find yourself making a site when you suddenly get confused or lost.

Make sure that your site loads quickly through optimization techniques. Visitors that get stuck waiting for slow pages to load.

Make sure all your links that could possibly be broken. The right time to make this is just before you FTP the page and take it live. This is important, since visitors are going to know that the information they are looking for is not available, only to find a 404 page, will leave your site in disgust.

Task based usability tests are a great way to determine how effective the design of your website is. The idea of the tasks, generally speaking, is to find information that is contained somewhere within the website. A well-designed site will make it easy for the user to complete the task at hand. If the user has trouble, it can provide you with valuable insight into areas where you can improve.

Never place pop-up ads on a website. People will most likely never want to visit your website again. Keep your ads simple since you don’t need any wild pop-ups.

Photoshop can be a very effective and helpful tool when it comes to website design.

Your website should have a favicon. That tiny little image will make sure that your site stands out if your visitor bookmarks your website. When a visitor browses his bookmarks, a distinctive favicon will stand out. Try making a favicon that goes with your theme and logo.

TIP! Utilizing all types of cost-free stock images can help you save cash. You can find these on many different sites, and the images are often just as high-quality as the images you would be purchasing from another site.

Remember that it does not a necessity for designing an effective website. Every costly design application has an affordable counterpart that does the same job for much less. Using this open source programs can lead to a lot of savings.

Keep the reading level of your audience in mind when writing website content.

Get some feedback on the web design that you create. What you find helpful and attractive as the web designer, others might find irrelevant and difficult to navigate. Talk to people in your target market and ask them what they do and do not like about your site.

TIP! It might seem basic, but your logo will be extremely important to your site’s performance. You have to be sure it shows what you can do while keeping you separate from the people you compete with.

Rather than making a fresh HTML code for each page that you have, just copy the main portion of the code, change it when it’s needed, and save it under a new file name. You can utilize the master copy over and over again.

So you should now have a better grasp of how you can design websites and make a good profit off of them. If you make use of your new knowledge, great sites lay ahead for you.

Stay competitive and keep up with the latest developments in the industry of web design. Things are constantly changing, and you do not want your site to fall behind. Blogs about web design are a great way to learn more about designing sites.

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