No matter what sort of website you have, it is important to make sure that it follows the principles of good web design. A poorly designed website will drive away visitors and frustrate those few who persevere. The following article can help you design a high quality website and attract more traffic.
You must always look at your finished websites in multiple browsers. Your content may show very differently to customers using alternate browsers. Design your site with the limitations of the different browsers in mind. Checking your website with different operating systems and browsers will help ensure that it works for everyone.
Avoid useless scripts. Scripts like counters and date/time scripts don’t really serve any purpose, and since they are all JavaScript, can add a few kilobytes to the page’s file size. Getting rid of these elements also frees up space on the homepage. Replace those useless scripts with useful content that keeps users coming back.
Continue to learn about web design. Do an Internet search on web design to find numerous free sites and forums.
Avoid trying to add every new gadget to your website. It can be tempting to make your site look cutting edge by including every new web design option out there but it can end up turning people off. Simple will generally get the job done even better than a flashy layout.
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.
White space is an important part of web design, so don’t be afraid to use it. Cluttering up your web pages with too many images or too much text, or using a distracting background, will only irritate your visitors. White space can make the important elements of your page more visible.
To help your website visitors easily navigate through your site, design it so that it becomes easy to find “stuff.” When you have a simple site that makes it easy to locate information, you keep your visitors there much longer. If you make it difficult for them, then they will get frustrated and leave.
You can create a site using free software. It is not necessary to spend a large amount of money on web designing software with the number of quality, free programs available. Hit your favorite search engine and do research to find a piece of software that suits your needs.
If you are not feeling confident in any area at all when you’re designing a website then go ahead and ask for help from someone. You can either find help from a friend or from strangers on places like forums on the web. Just be sure you don’t tackle anything without knowing what you’re doing first.
Organize your links and avoid putting too many links in one area of your site. Doing this can confuse visitors and make them leave your site. If you do have many low- to mid-importance links, emulate the “blogrolls” seen in many blogs and tuck them away in a column on the right side of the page.
As you have seen, the principles of good web design are not terribly mysterious or difficult to implement. However, too many websites still ignore these basic techniques. Do not let your site fall into this category. Put these techniques into practice to design a website that you can be proud of.
