So much life takes place online nowadays, and a great website is a must. If you want to learn about website design, this article can help.
When you design a site, pull it up in various browsers. What you see on one browser is not necessarily what others see on other browsers. Do research on the various browsers in use, and design your website accordingly. In addition, let someone who uses an operating system that differs from yours check the site for compatibility.
In order for your site to bring in visitors, its navigation must be intuitive. Links should be displayed where users will find them easily. You can also make navigating your site easier with a menu. Ensure that there are links to all of your main pages, such as the home and contact pages, in a prominent location on every page.
Your website should include a prominently displayed tagline. This is a statement or motto to define your business. Having a tagline is important; most users know if they will stay on a page after about eight seconds, so you need to do whatever it takes to keep their attention.
Programs are available to assist you in creating an attractive website. Many of these programs are easy to use and you can build a great website rather quickly. Let’s face it, a boring, drab site simply drives traffic away and that is not what we want to do.
Regardless of your client or website purpose, you need to strive for loading times of less than ten seconds. A good site will appear before a visitor’s eyes within moments. Many people browsing the web want instant gratification, so if you want to catch their attention, you need to provide that.
Do not use many different font types when creating your website. You need to also be mindful of how some fonts appear on monitors, since smaller serif fonts are difficult to read. Vedrdana is a great font that you can use to make your content easier to read.
Make it easy for visitors to back out of a process if they change their minds. Types of such actions would include registering an email, filling out forms, or browsing your site for archives or topics. If your visitors feel forced into completing something they no longer want, it may leave a bad taste. They will probably avoid visiting your site in the future.
To work out the visual aspects of your site design, you can use a program like Photoshop to create mockups. Photoshop or other similar programs, can advance you into a professional arena quickly. By not having a program like this, you will be at a disadvantage because making a beautiful website design from scratch takes a lot of time and knowledge.
Keep frames off your page. While they improve your site’s looks, any information contained in a frame is not indexed by search engines. If important site information isn’t seen by a search engine, then your ranking won’t be as high as it could be. You won’t get many visitors that way.
Continue to improve your site’s load time whenever possible. Visitors that get stuck waiting for slow pages to load will almost always leave the website. Reduce the graphics on your page and limit the script and use of Flash on your page.
If you are creating a very big website, you want to always incorporate a search function into the site. 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 add search functions to your site with Google and FreeFind.
Selecting a professional looking font is an important web page design consideration. Look at the font of a site and you can distinguish whether or not it’s professional. Don’t use handwriting or comic fonts as most people won’t have them installed. If your website calls for a font that your visitors do not have, a default font will be substituted. This will inevitably come off looking bad.
Hosting your site yourself isn’t recommended, even if you might have invested lots of money into it. You should do as much of the web page design work yourself as you can while allowing a reputable company to host the site. This means you can worry about your website design while the host worries about uptime and security.
As you have seen, designing a high quality web page does not have to be as difficult as you may fear. With practice, you will be a pro in no time. Just keep in mind the facts presented in this article.
Don’t add any pop-ups to your site. Pop-ups are an irritating distraction, at best, for most web surfers, and the possible benefits you could reap with them are extremely modest. When these windows pop up on the screen, you are likely to frustrate your visitors to the point that they are determined never to return.