In this day and age, you would be foolish to not even consider using advanced web design methods as a way to get your company's name out to the world. In order to make sure that you take hold of this opportunity and make the most out of it, with the amount of devices that are used to connect to the Internet that exist today, you will want to read this article.
When you're thinking about how to design a website, you need to be sure to think about the navigation. You want your navigation to be easily accessible and easy to use. Put the navigation bar on every page in a noticeable place. Also, make sure that it flows well with the rest of your page and doesn't distract visitors.
It is important to make use of forums and other information avenues to keep up with new ideas in web design. A quick online search can help you find a lot of great information.
Avoid using frames. Technology has moved on, although back then, they were the height of technology. For example, it is difficult to scroll with frames. There are much easier ways to provide your users a flow through your website.
Always mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. If the user does not have it, these files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer.
Keep each different topic separated. Put each topic on a different page. This will reduce visitor confusion and facilitate readability by the search engines.
Learning some basic HTML will help you add some interesting extras to your site. For example, you can have words that follow your cursor, or a banner that flashes important information. Make sure to change the fonts and colors occasionally, so you seem more involved with the web site and its design.
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. Emulate the "blogrolls" seen in many blogs and tuck them away in a column on the right side of the page if you do have many low- to mid-importance links.
HTML5 is what you're going to need to learn about if you're trying to do well with web design. If you don't know HTML5, you will have a great deal of work ahead of you, so start learning about it now.
Make sure your slogan is on every page of your website, including those that are housed in subdomains. Keywords will make your website more relevant to search engines and increase traffic to your site. If a page is relevant to their needs, Taglines are an easy way for visitors to determine.
For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. It is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents, although not only is this good for search engine optimization. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible.
Test your site early on and often. It is essential to do usability tests early in the developing phase. Keep testing and improving as the design nears completion.
Make sure your site includes a search box. This is really important, because people are accustomed to having that function, and when they want to find something on your site, they need to be able to find it. If they can't find what they need, they may leave your site altogether.
While it might free up some funds to use elsewhere on your site, hosting your own website is a bad idea. Having an experienced team of experts running your server for you, including upgrading the software and dealing with hardware failure, will leave you time to focus on your site itself.
Picking a host that is reliable is important and it doesn't matter if the website is for you or someone you're working on a site for. You want to make sure that you have a good host so that the site that you're working on is always going to be online and available for the world to view.
Obtain feedback from others on the design of your site. Talk to a web designer to find out what you did wrong. Try asking a select group of your website visitors to go through your website to report to you what they loved and disliked about it.
You can save some serious cash by choosing a free, open source program, if you're going to choose a software program to aid in the design of your website. Open source programs are great not only because they're free for public use, but also because they're constantly updated and improved by users with a lot of web know-how.
Of course, you won't find every single tip under the sun in one article. No article is that long. You should be able to get the hang of web design through these tips, however.
You've read the advice here and are ready to put it into action, so get ready to design your site! By sketching out a design and making lists of the content you'll need and you'll have your website online in no time, start.
I hope you've learned from this article and feel confident that you're ready to get started in the world of web design. Whether you are just starting to create your own site or you plan to build websites as a career, your first step is learning how it's done. Now you can move on to the fun stuff, enjoy!
