Web design is one of the newer ways a lot of people can make a good amount of profit from in today’s digital age. If you want to learn how to make some web sites so that you can pursue some of your personal endeavors then this article is the place for you.
Your website needs to function properly for visitors who use any kind of browser, so be sure to test out your site for browser compatibility. What works in Internet Explorer may not necessarily show up correctly in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Therefore, you should check how all the pages of your website display in all the major browsers on the market, before turning your site live.
Incorporate a site map into your website. Site maps serve several purposes. First, they make navigation throughout your site much easier for visitors. Second, the major search engines can utilize it to index your entire site. This means your search engine optimization improves, and your website receives more exposure, giving you more profit-earning potential.
To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages.
Test your website in the most popular browsers and platforms to make sure that it displays correctly. Sometimes scripts that work in one browser may not produce the same results in another browser. So you may need take extra measures, like adding a function for browser detection, in order to ensure that your website will display properly under most conditions.
Be sure your website works both with and without the “www” prefix. Some people will type this in before they head to your site as a force of habit, and some may not. You should make sure that customers will be directed to your site either way, or you may have some confused people on your hands.
Include a links page for your site and use it to provide a variety of resources related to the site’s purpose. You should also include a variety of links, including links to sites that are offering backlinks to your site. If related sites link back to your site, your site ranking will move up in the rankings on search results pages.
Images need ALT tags so do this while you are setting up your website. These tags are used to describe the images they accompany in case the image is not displayed, such as when a user disables graphics or is visually impaired and uses transcription software to translate images and read them aloud. If you use images as links, you can describe the link. The last thing is that ALT tags attract search engine crawlers, so you can get a better ranking by using them.
Use custom error pages to make your site more informative. For instance, if you want people to report dead links on your site, either put a server-side script on your 404 page or have a form or email address that visitors can use to report the error. You should have custom pages for 403, 404, and 500 errors, at the very least.
Learning all of the material from this article can be a bit much to take in, if you need to go ahead and read through this article again to make sure you digest all of the information presented. Once you feel confident use the tips from this article to assist you with web design.
