New web designers need to know web page design basics in order to create handsome, functional websites. Fortunately, many resources exist to assist a novice web designer in getting started. This article provides several useful tips that can improve one’s ability to design websites.
Prevent utilizing pop-ups on your site. There is little worse than visiting a site and being attacked by pop-up ads or newsletter sign-up boxes. Most people will immediately leave a website that has pop-ups, even if they are on big websites. You can avoid losing customers and visitors, by simply refusing to allow pop-up ads on your website. If your webhost places their own popup ads on your website, it is time for you to change your webhost.
To help design an attractive looking website, use interesting photos that you have taken. Having pictures on your website gives off a more user-friendly approach to your site. People will spend more time on your site looking around when they see pictures they want to click on.
Put a tagline on your site. Your tagline lets others know more about you or your business. You only have about 10 seconds to gain and keep hold of your visitors’ attention from the time they first hit your site.
Meta Tags
If you want your website to get more visitors, take care to use relevant, up-to-date meta tags on every page of your site. Quality meta tags describe your site for search engines. Your website will under-perform on search engines and draw fewer visitors than it should if you use inappropriate or ill-conceived meta tags.
Are you stuck? Look online for inspiration. When you need inspiration, you can browse through the almost limitless websites online. Find an interesting site and borrow features that will work on your site. Expand on those appealing aspects to help you build your own website. Improve upon the ideas you find.
Go easy on the graphics in your web design. While graphics are important to give your website a professional, cohesive and well-designed look, using too many of them can create clutter. Graphics should improve your site, not just pretty it up. Having the right amount of graphics that don’t clutter the design can improve the site’s usability, too.
Limit the amount of content you start out with on a given page to small amounts when you first start out. Adding too much stuff early on will create confusion for you and your visitors alike. Keep it simple to start.
Use a basic layout to get the hang of designing a website. You want to start out basic and then get advanced later on when you become better and more familiar with the whole website creation process.
Entertain with graphics. You want to do things like wrap texts around images so that your site doesn’t look so bland. When readers see that a website took time and effort to create, they are more likely to spend time or money with that site.
Before publishing your website, check it over carefully for any broken links. People will become frustrated if they a link leads them to a broken page. If you have very few links, you can check them manually. If many links, try using a link-checking program that can do the work for you quickly.
Do your best to not come across as a low rent spammer strictly focusing on playing the numbers game by forcing your visitor into something they don’t want. Don’t force your user to attend to pop-ups, surveys and other intrusive nonsense. If you take away the ability to move freely around your website, your readers are going to quickly get frustrated and want to leave your site.
Remember that it does not need to be costly to design a website. Though there are very good tools out there for making great websites, there are also ones that do the job for considerably less financial input on your part. Sometimes the free and open sources for website design software, will give you very similar results. Utilizing open source software can help you save a significant amount of money.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to create the whole website alone. Lots of knowledge from different areas must be known about website design, which includes user interface design, search engine optimization, web programming, content creation, and graphic design. You shouldn’t be embarrassed if you aren’t an expert in all of them. So, consider hiring a specialist to help you make your website great.
Use JavaScript only when necessary to avoid losing some potential viewers. For some people visiting your site, Java will cause problems instead of providing improved functionality. Not all web browsers are alike, and they are updated pretty frequently. Many of your viewers won’t have the most up to date version of the web browser they use. Also, everyone doesn’t enable JavaScript on their browsers. This means they’ll have difficulty viewing your site because of this.
Competency with multiple platforms will come in handy if you intend to set up multiple websites. PHP, MySQL, and Java will all come in handy in the future if you get into web page design. Whether you intend to become a professional web designer, or you just want to do the best work you can for yourself and your friends, you should try to develop a diverse skill-set.
When making many pages in a sub-category of your site, remember that copying and pasting can be your best friend. Rather than creating brand new code for each individual page, merely copy and paste the main code section, change it as necessary, and save the tweaked code as a brand new file every time. You will be able to use this master copy over and over again.
If you design websites, think like an artist. By that, we mean you should be open to inspiration all the time. Keep a notepad or PDA with you so you can sketch out ideas no matter where you are. Or if you are not in a position to jot things down, give your cellphone a call and leave yourself a message so you can pick it up at a later time.
Make use of free software in your site setup. Investing in powerful software packages like Photoshop is only worth it if you think they’ll pay off in the end. With a little search effort on your part, the kinds of tools you need can be found, and for free.
Now that you’ve been exposed to the basics, you should feel confident in moving forward with a website. Because there are so many different resources available, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to, or even how to, get started. You can get a head start by utilizing the insights given here.