Web Design: Tips To Help You

Jul 17, 2012 by Tillyg93

Optimize every image you use for the web. If you look through the internet, you can find a lot of examples of images that are too large and they slow down the webpage’s load time. Make sure you have optimized each image you use. Save the image as a JPEG or GIF and aim for the file size to be somewhere between 5k and 20k.

For the typical website, keep your background colors neutral. Textured backgrounds can easily overwhelm the visitor, and, when used improperly, can really make your design look amateurish. Stick to a white background or another neutral color. It’s been shown that these neutral colors are the easiest backgrounds from which to read.

You want to ensure that your site is capable of being viewed on all types of operating systems and programs, ranging from browsers such as internet explorer to firefox. You also want to be sure that your site works on both windows and mac operating systems so as many users as possible can view your content.

Do not depend on free web hosting if you are creating a commercial site. You are much better off spending money on basic web hosting, which will prevent your site from being clogged by advertisements that you cannot control. Furthermore, free web hosting might not provide you with enough bandwidth to support the kind of traffic your site may see.

Use custom error pages to make your site more informative. For instance, if you want people to report dead links on your site, either put a server-side script on your 404 page or have a form or email address that visitors can use to report the error. You should have custom pages for 403, 404, and 500 errors, at the very least.

Make sure you have a good idea about what types of pages you want to add to your website. Site design is only easy if you plan ahead thoroughly. If you need a contact page, a sales page, various landing pages, etc, make sure you add them all early on. You can always edit as needed as the site starts to take shape.

A great way to determine your website appeal is to check your site’s statistics every time you update the site. You will be able to tell who is visiting your site and which pages they’re spending the most time on. This will give you an idea on what to update to keep them coming back for more.

Graphics and various media are great for your site and help keep the attention of the viewers, but don’t load every page from top-to-bottom. Pages that are extremely heavy with media will consume bandwidth on yours and the viewer’s network, which often leaves both parties suffering. Include graphics when they are relevant and do your best to minimize bandwidth consumption.

If you’re working on web design use the right graphics for the job. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don’t work well, PNGs work fine. For screenshots, text buttons, and other non-photographic images, use PNG if the image has more than 256 colors, and GIF if not. For photos, you can use JPEG images.

To help make your site more interactive incorporate games into your site. Having games on your site makes it a lot of fun for the visitor. If your visitors are not having a good time on your site, then they will leave and go look for something else to do.

Keep your page sizes to a minimum. Not all internet users have fast connection speeds, and the longer your site takes to load, the less interest they will have. You do not want your page viewers to be stuck waiting for every page to download, or they may end up abandoning your site.

Don’t use JavaScript too much when designing your website. Some people do not have java-enabled on their machine, and many are still using out-of-date browsers. Instead of using too much JavaScript and AJAX, make your sites clean and lean a bit more on graceful degradation. Remember, the goal is to make your site user-friendly for all users.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a great program to try if you need to create a website. Even amateurs can quickly get the hang of using this program. You can add many different features, create various templates and layouts, and test how your site will look once it’s loaded onto a permanent server.

Make sure your website uses a consistent font throughout. Some websites change fonts willy-nilly without any design reason to do so. This makes the content difficult to process for visitors. Most websites, especially business websites, will do just fine sticking to basic fonts like Arial, Veranda, or even Times New Roman.

Make sure your website content is both interesting and compelling. While the look of the design is important, the content is what keeps visitors returning to your site. When your content provides useful and valuable information that addresses the needs of your site visitors, those visitors are more likely to come back to your site in the future.

The design of your website should include simple and effective navigation tools. This includes site maps, navigation menus, links and footers. Make certain that the navigation menus are prominently displayed so that users can identify them immediately, and that the links in the menu are clearly labeled so users will intuitively know where the links will take them. Effective navigation tools enable users to quickly find what they are looking for, and this will have a direct impact on how they view your website.

Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, you are probably itching to go out there and design a killer website. Armed with the knowledge that you’ve gotten from this article, you should be able to do just that. Use this information and your best instincts to design the site of your dreams.

Benita Freiheit is a pro concerning temecula website design