Whether you are designing your first website or your fiftieth, the design is one of the most important aspects of any website. Seeing that the site meets certain standards of excellence in usability, content quality, and aesthetics will surely keep visitors coming back. To learn more about web page design, and how to create a functional, attractive site, read through the advice below.
One critical part of great website development is ease of navigation. Important links should be highly visible on every page. A navigation menu will also help visitors locate exactly what they’re looking for. Make sure that you have links posted to every page of the website. This will allow visitors to easily navigate the site.
Remember, frames are a thing of the past and while revisiting past memories can be fun, adding outdated frames will only make your designs appear to be zombies from the world wide web graveyard. Frames were popular on web pages back then but they created numerous problems. Frame designs are difficult for people to bookmark and scroll through. There are much easier ways to provide your users a flow through your website.
It is imperative to replace old content with new. For example, if your web page is promoting some event that occurred a year ago, you’ve probably lost a lot of your readers. Users are going to want to spend time on websites that have been cared for, and when old information is kept up it shows that the site is not being paid attention to. Set yourself a schedule for reviewing your site and removing anything that is outdated.
Make sure your website is easily scanned. Most website visitors do not really read online content. They just scan it looking for interesting tidbits of information. Divide your content into sections that readers can readily scan and your visitors will come back for more. In addition, be sure to keep key information toward the top portion of the page. Your users will appreciate it, because it helps them know if your site has what they are looking for.
Let users cancel actions if they desire. For example, put a “clear” button on a form, an unsubscribe link on all newsletters and a “cancel” button on orders. If you don’t give visitors the opportunity to cancel their actions, you are depriving them of control, and that can prove fatal to your website.
Make sure all topics are clearly divided. If you’ve got a few discussions going, put each on its own page. This will help to alleviate confusion and help keep your site organized. It will also make it easier for web crawlers to better navigate and rank your site.
The type of files you use for graphics on your site are related directly to the size of the file. This affects the load time of your site. Your graphics should be GIFs and JPEGs. The reason for this is that PNG and BMP files take up a lot of disk space. By converting your file types to more manageable sizes, you will provide your visitors with a better experience.
No matter what type of website you design or who the audience is you want to target, always keep the page load time under ten seconds. A good site will appear before a visitor’s eyes within moments. Most visitors want things to happen quickly and easily. If you don’t offer that to them, you will lose those visitors.
When putting links on your pages, the links need content. The purpose is to ensure that your customer or client is clicking on exactly what they are hoping to find. Links on a site page without content, visitors can accidentally click on links.
Visitors do not enjoy seeing a website counter on your page. Though you may think it adds to the appeal, your visitors will not agree. Eliminate visitor counters, and find other methods of tracking the number of visitors to your site.
Do not have pop-up windows on your site. While these might seem valuable in some instances, most people think they are rather annoying. If customers see these popups and get frustrated, they may not come back to your site.
If you are thinking about different topics for websites, it is important that you secure a domain name for the site, immediately. Be creative and pick out something that you want, but make sure you reserve it now so that you can still have it later on down the road. 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 often think alike.
Practice as often as possible, as you begin to learn web design. Start trying out ideas as you learn them. This is important so that you will understand well how each step fits into the bigger picture and becomes easier for you to handle. Simply reading an idea is not the same as practicing it.
Use ALT tags for your website. These tags are important for your website and people that disable graphics. If part of a link, you can include information about the link intention. Also, search engine crawlers use ALT tags, so your site is going to rank higher.
This article will help you put together a user-friendly site that engages your customers. If you can do this, your profits will go up quickly.