From blogs to storefronts, great web design is always key in presenting your content to the world. Who will trust what you have to say if your site looks unprofessional? The information contained in this article will help you to build a website which looks great, functions cleanly and brings you the traffic you deserve!
Avoid using so-called “mystery meat navigation”. This involves using unlabeled images or other elements for the site’s navigation. In many cases, the visitor has to mouse over the buttons to even see what they do. Navigation is best kept simple. Use text links across the top or along the left side of the page.
Do not use images for your background. When you think about some of the biggest websites on the Internet, they do not have images as backgrounds. When you use image backgrounds, you represent yourself as someone who is not well-versed in web designing. Images as backgrounds also cause your site to load slower, which can lead to user frustration.
Make sure everything is easy to locate on your website. Spend some serious thought on how everything on your site will be laid out. When content is randomly thrown on your site with little thought to the layout, you are making things harder for the people whose use of your site ensures your online success – your site visitors.
Make sure that your site is optimized for previous editions of Internet Explorer. Most people have a love-hate relationship with IE; however, many people are still using it, including older versions. Since many elements are not up-to-date you will have to work around it. Specifically, you’ll want to know about IE’s “box model bug.”
Your site’s files sizes are all affected by things like your graphics, and all of those can affect your site’s loading speed. Generally you are better off using GIFs or JPEGs for your graphics. PNG and BMP files offer advantages for web graphics, but the file sizes are too much for internet load times. Try converting images files to smaller sizes to make sure everyone that visits your site has a good experience.
To be updated on the new web design tricks, you should join an online forum. When joining these message boards you meet people who usually have an understanding of all the new web design technology. Without this new web design technology you could end up with a site that is completely outdated.
It’s not always a good idea to host your website yourself, even when you have a great deal of money sunk in the venture. Design your website as much as you can by yourself, but have someone else host it, so that you do not have to worry about its security and safety.
Learn as much as you can about the various forms of html, as the html is crucial to web design. When you learn about html go ahead and make a couple of pages that are sort of filled with the information that you want to add to any of the sites you plan on working on.
When you do progress through your stages of web design and have a site that is up and running you want to make sure that it isn’t cluttered with ads. People don’t mind ads but they hate it when there are a lot that make it difficult to navigate through your site, and you don’t want people mad.
Usability tests that are task based are a good tool for determining the effectiveness of a website. These tests find information deep in your site. Should the site be designed well, the task is easy for the user to complete. However, if it’s not, it will give you insight into what areas on your website need improvement.
We are all used to seeing the letters “www” at the beginning of a website address. But this well known sub-domain is not always necessary to gain access to a site. Be sure that your site works with or without this, as you could lose a lot of traffic by users who don’t know that it works both ways.
Do tests on your site to make sure that it’s up and running properly on different operating systems and different type of browsers as well. When you do this you then cover all of your tracks and make sure that as many users as possible are able to browse through your site.
I hope you’ve learned from the QuistBuilder in North Carolina article and feel confident that you’re ready to get started in the world of web design.