When designing an excellent site, are you in need of expensive software and special templates? Your dependence on new, expensive technology will decrease as you learn more about the mechanics of website design. If you want to be lazy about it, you will ultimately have to rely on a third-party program or company to do the work for you. As long as you’ve go the proper motivation, the tips in this article will get you started building a quality web site.
Use fixed-position navigation. Websites that employ this technique have a navigation panel locked in place even when visitors scroll down. This is convenient for visitors and helps frequent visitors quickly find what they need.
Choose proper graphic for your web designs. Keep in mind that PNGs are much better than large and poorly working bitmap images. PNG is the right choice for non-photo images, such as text buttons and screen shots. If an image has in excess of 256 colors choose PNG. If it does not, GIF is another option. Photos require JPEG to ensure high quality.
A simple to navigate website will retain visitors. You should have links that are easy to find, as well as displayed well. Good menus make navigating your site much easier. Ensure that you have a link to your website’s home page on every page on your website so that visitors can easily return to you site’s main page.
No matter the audience you seek to target or the focus of your site, it is important to focus on load times that are under ten seconds. You want your site to load quickly on the browser of whoever is visiting your page. If the site takes too long to load, you run the risk of losing your audience.
White is a great choice for a background color. It’s simplistic, yet has a lot of potential at adding flare and color elsewhere. Few visitors take issue with a white background, which looks professional or, at worst, neutral. Text content is also more clear on a white background. However, intricate background images are often difficult to pull off; more often than not they appear sloppy and distracting. Simple backgrounds are generally better.
Keep your homepage simple. This will cause people to want to jump ship early. Be descriptive about what your business does, and your unique offerings, but keep everything else to a minimum to avoid distraction.
Make sure that your site is optimized for previous editions of Internet Explorer. People seem to hate this browser, but many still use older versions. These do not render the web elements to the web standard, so there must be workarounds. It is important that you are familiar with “box model bug” which has harmed IE for awhile now.
Meta Tags
If you want your site to become more visible to online users, you must learn to use proper meta tags for each page. Good meta tags will help search engines categorize your site properly. Well-written meta tags will garner the most visitors to your site.
Do your best to optimize the loading times on every page of your website. Visitors would rather leave than wait. Some effective ideas include using SSI files, making the most of your HTML, making expire headings, getting rid of excess script, Flash, and graphics and keeping CSS and JS coding to a minimum.
Test your site on multiple browsers, platforms (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc.) and devices (Mac, PC, tablets, cell phones, etc.) Every browser sees sites a little differently, since these can affect the user experience. There are a number of resources that you can use to determine what popular web browsers should be tested. It is very crucial that you test your website with all of the browsers, and that will include all of the main mobile web browsers.
To learn how to design a site is not like you are learning how to do open heart surgery. You don’t need a formal education, and you aren’t making any life or death decisions. If you put the advice you’ve read to use, you can be on the road to designing an amazing website in no time.