There’s a lot more involved with web design than you think. From planning, to design, to SEO, there is a ton to know. Follow the tips presented here for a step-by-step guide to web design.
Be an expert on your subject. Research your subject before posting anything. When your visitors see that you can’t be trusted because you’re giving out erroneous info, you will lose them. Knowing your subject is important when making a good blog.
Don’t include pop-up windows when designing your website. They may seem helpful, but they are seen as more annoying by visitors than not. Frequent pop-ups can cause your visitors to become disturbed enough to leave your site, hurting your reputation.
To help you design your site to attract more visitors, you need to include good meta tags on each page. Quality meta tags will help the search engines to recognize what your site is all about. Meta tags that don’t accurately reflect the content of your website will negatively impact your traffic.
Optimize your website to ensure fast load times. Visitors to your site may be more likely to navigate away from your page if it takes too long to load pages. Minimize the amount of Flash, scripts and graphics on your site. Optimize the site with HTML, SSI files, caching options and minimize CSS and JS coding.
When you design your site, you can make some independent CSS pages. This will allow web browsers to use conditional loading. These two things make maintenance and testing simpler. Every website occasionally needs maintenance, so you want to minimize the time you spend here.
Be sure to always look at the links on your site, and make sure none are broken. Do this frequently, before you upload it to your server. This is necessary because when you have visitors come to your site they will find that the information they want to see is not available anymore and if this is to happen a lot on your site, they will leave. To prevent this from happening, do a quick check to ensure everything is working properly.
Do not clutter your website by using every square pixel of space that you have available. Using all pixels within the site could make your website seem overwhelming and cluttered. Allow for good spacing between elements, which will in turn, make the experience more pleasant for your visitors. There are many cases in which empty space is actually more valuable than other content.
Skip the website counter that tells visitors what number they are. You might think they are a valuable addition to your site, but nothing could be further from the truth. Get rid of the counter and monitor your traffic by other means.
Basic design tools will get you started on your website, but you will want to add some custom options. You should be able to customize your website to reflect your taste and personality, so this means adding enhancements that the website builder may not offer.
Sign up for forums, newsletters and podcasts that discuss web design to help you keep up with the trends. Anyone can gain from the information contained in a newsletter, regardless of experience.
To show that you care about the quality content on your website, always that the time to carefully proofread. The goal is to have people go through the information with ease. A site with errors is not very professional and it will make people want to stay away from your site.
This article provided you with a variety of website basics. As you learn techniques and strategies, you can better understand site design and how to translate the knowledge into a well-designed site. Come back and read these tips over again if you run into trouble.
