Enhance Your Site With These Web Design Tips
When you look at Google’s homepage, you’ll see a simple, clean site. Most sites try to bombard you with information to get you excited about their content. No matter what you want your site to be like, you should know web design basics. Keep reading to learn more.
Don’t neglect to cascade style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user’s local cache thereafter.
Don’t disable the visitor’s right-click functionality. Some sites do this in order to prevent people from copying and pasting text or saving images from the site. The thing is, it doesn’t work and disables other useful functions. OCR can be used to capture text from such sites, and grabbing images is as simple as taking a screenshot.
Break up long text blocks. Having a huge wave of text is unnecessary for any site, especially when you can break it up by using images, or even separating it into different pages. Boring your viewers will only make them leave, so keep things as simple and fresh as possible.
Make sure your website is easily scanned. Many usability tests show that most online visitors do not read everything. They usually only scan for things that interest them. Easily-skimmed articles will make it easier on readers and will entice them to come back another time. Definitely keep the most timely and important items near the top. This gives your visitors a better experience.
So that you can create a visually appealing site, get yourself a web design program. These programs are easy to use and help you learn the basics. People won’t visit your site unless they like how it looks and functions.
For the best layout, make sure that the colors you choose for the background and font are restful to the eyes. Choosing moving backgrounds or neon colors can make it hard for people to read, and they may navigate to another website. However, include pictures to break up your content and make the site complete.
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.
Images need ALT tags so do this while you are setting up your website. These tags help describe images for those that use graphic-disabled browsers and for those that are visually impaired and who use tools to translate the images to voice. If you use images as links, the ALT tags will give you a way to describe the links’ behaviors. And most importantly, search engine bots need to see the descriptions through ALT tags in order to help your search engine ranking.
Even if you invest a bunch into your site, hosting yourself isn’t wise. Even if you create the basic design yourself, do not fall into the trap of spending the inordinate amounts of time necessary to host it yourself.
Proofread all of your site’s content. Keeping it simple allows visitors to find what you want them to find as quickly as possible. Errors that appear on your site make the site appear unprofessional, and the credibility of the site is likely to take a hit.
If you are designing a commercial website, you do not want to use free web hosting. This brings annoying ads onto your site, and it detracts from a professional look to your commerce site. Instead, pay for some basic or professional web hosting, in which you do not have to put up with this.
Understand that when you first start out it’s going to take time for your site to become popular. You can try your best to generate as much traffic to your site as possible but make sure that you know what to expect so that you can continuously adapt your strategies accordingly.
Best practices in web design are constantly evolving. What was standard a year ago could be deprecated today, or even be completely unusable. This is why it is so important to stay up to date, and also crucial that you verify everything you learn. Make certain that the information you acquire is current and not outdated.
Learn many server-side languages if you want to diversify your web design portfolio. For example, learn Java, ASP, PHP and MySQL so you are prepared for any client who approaches you. Regardless of whether you’re building a brand new site or you’re helping a friend create one, you should aim to turn into a designer with many different talents.
Regardless of how you want your website to look, you can achieve your vision with the tips included here. Use these tips and create a website that you can proud of and which can start gaining visitors.