Hiring a professional web designer to develop your website is a large investment. The high cost does not always guarantee a satisfactory result. The reality is there’s no way to express what you want accurately. You are the only one who knows exactly what you are looking for in a website. Keeping this web design advice in mind, you are sure to make something you can be proud of.
Make sure your webpages aren’t too long. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and if your most important content is “below the fold,” it may not even be read. If you have a lot of related content that needs to stay together, consider breaking it up into sections and adding links to each section.
Check your pages for broken links. Visitors become frustrated easily when they click a link and find that it leads to the wrong place. If you have very few links, you can check them manually. If many links, try using a link-checking program that can do the work for you quickly.
To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k.
To help you design a site that is easy for people to read all the information, make sure the pages are not too wide. If the pages are not too wide then they will fit on most people’s computer screens. If the page is too wide, then part of your valuable information could be left off the page.
Ensure that you’re including a method of receiving feedback from your site’s visitors. This will clue you in to ways that your website falls short of their expectations or doesn’t work properly, enabling you to make the necessary changes. Involving your visitors in your website can help to bond them to your brand and bring them back time and time again.
When designing your site, try to come up with three or four keywords that you expect users to input into search engines as they try to find your page. These keywords should then be repeated frequently throughout the title, page body and description meta tag. This will make it easier for users to locate your site on the web.
When designing your website, you should utilize cascading style sheets, or CSS. These style sheets can be applied to every webpage on your website, and will ensure that the user experience is consistent throughout the website. They are also effective for making quick design changes to your website due to the fact that you only need to change the style sheet as opposed to making alterations on every webpage.
Optimize your website to handle computers that may be running older versions of programs like Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Many consumers still depend on IE. Unfortunately, many aspects of your site may not be compatible or displayed properly due to outdated rendering standards, so you may have to create some fixes for the elements that do not work properly. Looking up “box model bug” can be very helpful.
A great thing about designing web pages, other than it being simple to do, is that you are able to bring your vision to life with just a few easy clicks or some lines of code. Hopefully this article has given you some inspiration with the advice and tips that will urge you on to successful web design. Give the tips a shot.
