The first thing your visitors notice will be the design of your website. Be sure to design your website so that it looks like a place you would spend time browsing. The tips in this article can help you evade the pitfalls of web design.
Use JavaScript to include a custom font on your webpages. Libraries like Typekit and Google Web Fonts make it easy to include esoteric fonts on webpages, even if most visitors don’t have those fonts on their computers. It works by embedding the font itself into JavaScript so that it can be decoded by the client on the fly.
Test your website before it goes live. There’s nothing worse then launching your new website and having to take it down right away due to bugs or other issues. Get a group of people together who are using different web browsers and computer platforms, and ask them to use a beta version of your website, writing down any issues they come across.
If you want your site visitors to spend as much time as possible on your site, make text easy to read. One of the most common design mistakes is using graphic backgrounds with patterns or dark colors; combine this with equally dark text and you have a recipe for disaster. Unless the text is clear and easy to read, your site will not be a success.
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.
Add pictures to your site to make it look better Pictures help your site seem more approachable and user friendly. People always like to look at interesting pictures that they have never seen before, and many times will spend hours on your site looking at them.
The best web sites communicate a lot of information in a small amount of words. If you are long-winded, people will easily get bored and find another site that is more concise. Make sure any content is relevant and easy to understand – newspapers use an eighth grade reading level, which is the most common literacy level.
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.
Anyone wishing to design a great-looking site should consider spending a lot of time on the header image. This is what visitors are noticing as soon as they log on to your website, so having something that’s on topic and visually appealing is a good move. Creating your own instead of using a premade header is the best way to go.
Ask friends and colleagues about HTML, Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Knowing as much as possible about every facet of web design is key to giving yourself the ability to design great websites.
Do your best to stay consistent with your efforts when you are learning web design. You don’t want to learn a couple of things then come back a couple of weeks later and try to learn something new and already have forgotten the information that you had previously learned complicating your whole web design process.
Make a good first impression by making your website inviting for regular visitors and casual browsers. It’s advantageous to make certain their first impression of your site is a great experience. The tips provided here should help you deliver the type of web design that engages and keeps visitors.
