Flash is not something you want to use on your site. While Flash can look very high-tech and exciting, on some devices it will cause everything to slow down. Don’t forget that many phones and tablet PCs don’t have Fl;ash enabled, which can ruin the user experience for some and dissuade them from returning to your site.
Concept sketches are a great way to organize and plan out a website during the earliest, most flexible stages of the web design process. These sketches will serve as a tool to increase your chances of a successful launch, and help you decide on the finished look of the site. It will jump start the web design process.
Consider the Internet a global marketplace; try to make your sites easy to view and use regardless of what country a visitor lives in. For example, currencies, measurements and ways of writing dates vary from country to country. Try to make these as universal as possible, or at least, make them easy for foreign visitors to read and understand. You want your content to be as accessible to as many people as possible, as not everyone who is viewing your website is going to be from your country.
Perform a thorough error check of your site, including checking for broken links. Do this often, and especially before uploading any of it to the server. A visitor who comes across a broken link will question how dated all of the content on your site might be. Therefore, you want to double-check that everything is working as it should so you can avoid this from happening.
For those beginning to construct their own website, it’s important to consider using grid or shared hosting as an alternative to VPS hosting. This will allow you to see how much traffic you get.
When you are making a number of pages that require the same template, the simplest way to do this is to use copy/paste. Rather than taking the time to constantly start from scratch with HTML coding, just copy existing content and re-save it with a new name. You will be able to use that master copy indefinitely.
In the “About Us” area of your site, write some good content about who you are. Many sites use very boring, trite ideas on these pages. Try spicing things up! Try to give people a little look what your personal background looks like, try to show what made you get into web designing, who or what inspired it, and what you would like to achieve with your business.
Set up your site so that visitors can cancel actions they initiate if they change their minds. For example, allow users to cancel registration for newsletters or easily back out of a search. Forcing your user to complete an action they don’t wish to will ensure they never sign up for anything on your site again, nor are they likely to return at all.
Do not place any popup adverts on your website. Even though you may find a reason to have them, your visitors will find them annoying. When you annoy your visitors with these popup adverts, they will more than likely leave your website and vow never to return.
Most of the time, visitors go to a website to learn something or to do something, rather than ooh and aah at the site’s design. Make sure that every piece of content, picture, and multimedia file you put on your website has a direct, positive impact on the message you want to deliver to visitors. Your page will load faster if it is simple.
It’s hard to go wrong with a simple color like white for the background of your website. If you use a white background, your content can end up being simpler to read — and build trust in your site. However, intricate background images are often difficult to pull off; more often than not they appear sloppy and distracting. For backgrounds, simpler is usually preferable.
Even more important than a good looking website is one that loads fast, and that means all of your files should be small. This is because the size of the files dictates the speed at which your website loads. It is always a good idea for your website to load as quickly as possible. You must also be aware that everyone doesn’t have a high speed connection to the Internet. Perform tests on your website to confirm that it can be quickly loaded, even on the slowest internet connection.
Make sure that you place a search box at the top of each of your webpages, and ensure that the input field is at least 26 characters. The button that puts the search query into the system should be labeled “search”, rather than “submit” or “okay.” Making the search box properly ensures that it is seen easily, used easily, and helps visitors to your site locate the information they want.
It’s not necessary to do all of the design work yourself. You need to be knowledgable in areas like web programming, interface design, content creation and search engine optimization to be successful at web design. There is no shame in getting help when you need it. If there are areas that are unfamiliar to you, consider hiring a professional service to help you.
As you have seen, it is important to know the principles of web design if you want to make an attractive web site that works properly. It can be hard to figure out where to begin when there is so much information available. This article is a good starting point, as it contains the basics of good web design.