You probably feel excited and frightened about creating your own website. You are probably wondering how much designing your website will cost and where to find a designer. The following tips should give you enough information to draw up a basic plan and start building a quality website.
Put a tagline on your site. This lets people know about the site. There are about eight crucial seconds to grab and keep a visitor’s attention, so having an easy-to-understand tagline is crucial.
Before going live, test your website against NoScript. See if the website is readable. Some types of content, such as product ordering systems, won’t work without scripts, however if your website looks completely blank without any scripts, you have work to do.
Be sure to use proper graphics when designing your website. Bitmap images usually are big and don’t work as well as PNGs. 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. For photos, you can use JPEG images.
Make sure the content on your website is compelling and interesting. A great looking site is no good if it has bland, unoriginal content. If you have insightful, useful content that people want to read about, you are much more likely to have repeat visitors.
Bearing aesthetics in mind, you should remember to keep file sizes small. The smaller the size of each of your files, the quicker your pages will load. You want your loading time to be as quick as possible. Remember, some of your website’s visitors will not be using a fast Internet connection. Test your website to ensure that it loads quickly even on a dial-up modem connection.
Search Engines
It is important to make use of forums and other information avenues to keep up with new ideas in web design. You can find the answer to almost any web design question by simply searching with your favorite search engine.
To help you design a website that is optimized for search engines, do not include frames. While frames look nice, they do not help when it comes to search engines. If the search engines can’t view this important information, then you’re not going to fare well in the search engine rankings. This will lead to a reduction in visitors.
You must be sure that your site is optimized properly so that it can be viewed in all browsers. People usually say they hate Internet Explorer, but many people still use it. Unfortunately, many aspects of your site may not be compatible or displayed properly due to outdated rendering standards, so you may have to create some fixes for the elements that do not work properly. Specifically, you should get up to date about an issue that plagued IE called “box model bug”.
Always make sure navigation is clear and easy. The placement of your navigation links on a website plays an important part in determining how long a visitor will remain on your site. The structure for navigation should be consistent, neat, and easy to use if you want your visitors to enjoy their experience.
Know your niche. If you intend to create a blog, know about your subject before you write about it. You can lose readers if you give them false or unclear information. It is important to know what you are talking about.
File sizes affect the speed with which your website loads. You can control file size by paying attention to file types. When it comes to graphics, it is normally wise to employ GIFs and JPEGS. While PNG and BMP files create crisper graphics, these types of files can take up significant disk space. Try converting images files to smaller sizes to make sure everyone that visits your site has a good experience.
Optimize load times on your website. Most visitors will leave if it takes a long time to load your website. Reduce graphics, scripts and Flash consoles on your web page, optimize HTML and utilize SSI files.
Improve Upon
Keep your content interesting and entertaining. While how your design looks is important, visitors will not return if there is no content worth reading. When you have relevant content on your site that appeals to your viewers and takes into account what they are looking for, there is a good chance they will want to visit again in the near future.
When people hit the creative wall as you will do at some point, look towards electronic information available all over the web to bust through. There is no shortage of websites from which you can draw inspiration. Find a website that you like, identify what makes that website appealing, and determine if it is an idea that you can borrow and improve upon. Borrow ideas and create your own to build a truly unique page. Improve upon the ideas you find.
While making your website, remember that you don’t need to use all the available space. If you insist on making use of each pixel, your site may end up cluttered. Leave some space between the items you want your visitors to notice. This will give your website a more comfortable atmosphere. In many ways, empty space provides value to a website.
Website counters near the bottom of the page are pretty unattractive. You might like the number going up, but your visitors don’t like it. Find another way to track your traffic.
When deciding on a background color for your website, white is a very effective and good choice. White pages are professional looking and don’t distract your visitors. Complicated, artsy background designs look cool, but they can often be distracting to the reader. Simple instead of complex is always better where backgrounds are concerned.
Although the tools that a host makes available for website design can help you arrange your site’s basic layout, you shouldn’t rely on them exclusively. Eventually you want to incorporate your own ideas into the site, which means lots of tinkering and experimenting with different things without having to rely on the simple functions of the site-builder you get from the host provider.
Your code is already created in development platforms, but classic text editors may be more reliable. The idea behind platform is that you are responsible for designing site features, then just paste in the generated code. To minimize errors and work with the code in a more hands-on way, choose a standard text editor.
Having reviewed this article, you are ready to apply the many ideas you have learned to your own design projects. Draft up a budget, seek out advisers and begin sketching out your site. You’ll see that designing a website that you can be proud of IS possible – so get to it!
If you have some ideas for more than one website, you should reserve a name for your domain, now. Once you’ve thought of a domain name that you like, you should reserve it so that it’s still there when you’re ready to use it. It may shock you how others could possibly come up with the same domain name, but it happens countless times and you want what will work best for traffic and not settle for second best. Great minds do think alike, after all!