When it comes to web design, you will find it important to ensure that you are reading the best advice around. Use the advice provided here if you want to make your website look great and compete with other professional ones. There is quite a bit to learn, and this article is a perfect way to start off.
Don’t use splash pages for your site unless required by law, and especially don’t use a Flash intro. Most people just want to get to your content as quickly as possible, and don’t care to look at useless splash pages. If you have some amusing content that you absolutely want visitors to see, integrate it into the homepage instead.
Test your site to see if the major translation services work properly when translating your site. Some sites receive many international visitors, and these visitors sometimes use services like BabelFish and Google Translate to translate the text to their language. Certain web design problems, especially poor server side code, can break these services.
Give your visitors the ability to search your site so that they can more easily find what they are looking for. If someone cannot find what they are looking for right away, their next thought will be to look for a search field. Put this somewhere obvious and include a search button.
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.
To help design an attractive looking website, use interesting photos that you have taken. Pictures help your site seem more approachable and user friendly. When people see a picture, they spend more time on the site and clicking to see more.
Eliminate pop-up windows from all pages on your site to create a user-friendly experience. Most people will be turned off by a site that pop’s windows up in their face. As a result, your users may just go away from your site, too angry to come back.
It’s very important that you do all that you can to get load times for your website down to a minimum. People are more likely to leave your site if the load time is too long. Speed your website up by having less scripts running, few graphics, minimal amount of flash, use SSI files, tweak the HTML, use server side caching, and lessen the amount of CSS and JS coding.
Try to make sure that any music or pictures that you’re linking to is hosted on your own web server. Do not hotlink to any other website images. This can be construed as bandwidth theft and it could put you in violation of a copyright too. It’s not worth the risk.
Try your best to update the content of any old sites that you have. You want to make sure that any of the sites you build seem like they’re up to date with the technology that is out today – you don’t want a site that looks 10 years old.
Remember that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to design your website. There are certainly expensive design tools out there, but many companies offer software with similar features at a fraction of the cost. For example, free open-source software can usually help you to accomplish the exact same tasks that paid software does. These open source solutions are the key to saving money in your budget.
To summarize, it is critical that you give yourself a good base of web design knowledge before trying to start your own site. Hopefully you were able to find these tips well written and relevant. Implement these tips and you will find that you will love new experience that you are going to have with web design.
