Having a strong understanding of effective design practices is critical for creating and maintaining a winning website. Excellent web design causes your website to look better. In addition, this can make your site easier to utilize, and provide it with more of a genuine feel. This will gain you an increase in both new and repeat traffic. This article will help you in your design plans.
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.
Good websites must function with all browsers, and therefore you need to test each page so you know they work correctly under all circumstances. Some things that work in Internet Explorer might not work correctly in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. Before you set your site to go live, look at how every page shows up in all the major browsers.
For the best layout, make sure that the colors you choose for the background and font are restful to the eyes. Choosing moving backgrounds or neon colors can make it hard for people to read, and they may navigate to another web site. However, include pictures to break up your content and make the site complete.
Make sure your website uses a consistent font throughout. Some websites change fonts willy-nilly without any design reason to do so. This makes the content difficult to process for visitors. Most websites, especially business websites, will do just fine sticking to basic fonts like Arial, Veranda, or even Times New Roman.
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.
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.
Be sure the websites you’re designing are cross-browser compatible. You must check your site in the most popular versions of every top browser. Some examples include Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Many users use these browsers for surfing online, so you need to be sure your designs are being seen correctly on whatever they use.
Pages of a website are very important for even the smallest sites, so make sure that you really have an eye for detail. You need to make sure that the latest page you have added to your site has the same dimensions and features of your previous pages. The last thing you want is a hodgepodge of different styles and themes on one site.
Making use of excellent practices for web design has a lot of benefits. When you do this you have a lot more at your disposal to add to your site, which can make your site look that much better, gaining trust from visitors. The web design principles you employ can make the difference between your website’s success and failure. The above article has given you some excellent advice about how to design your pages effectively. Utilize them to ensure the success of your website!
