Tag Archives: web design tips

Richard Vanderhurst

Web Design Tips That Everybody Should Know About

Paying a professional to design a website for you can be very costly. Even after you have spent a small fortune, you may not have exactly what you hoped for. Explaining clearly what you want can be hard. You are the only one who truly knows what you want. Continue on for some great web design tips that will show you how to build a site that you can be proud of.

Most of your visitors will find popup windows and links that open in new windows irritating. Actually, many have disabled this function in their browser. These are techniques that should be avoided. If such techniques are part of your site navigation, you should consider reworking your navigation system to avoid them.

Choose a good background. You don’t want your text to be hard to read! A distracting background is…well, distracting. Choose a background that accentuates what your site already has to offer, rather than works against it. This will help get your message across to your visitors.

When you are in the process of choosing your web host, you want to be certain that you understand all facets of the package. What you are going to need to know is CPU usage, bandwidth, disk space, and some other areas that come with the package. Never buy a hosting package without understanding everything that’s included.

Good meta tags are a quick way to ensure your website makes it to a good rank on search engines. Quality meta tags describe your site for search engines. If you use meta tags that do not correspond to your content or to your target audience, do not expect to get a lot of visitors.

If you are going to be a website designer, unleash your inner artist. This means that you should be prepared to receive inspiration as it occurs. If you’re eating out and an idea comes to you, be sure to jot that idea on your napkin. Make sure you always write down, or draw your ideas, so you won’t forget them later.

Make sure to include a search function. This is vital to maximizing the usability of your site, and helping your vistors find what they need. These tools are easy to add to your site, and they provide a huge added value for your readers.

Most people know about Photoshop, and they realize that it takes some effort and knowledge to use it effectively in web design. Fewer people are familiar with the program Dreamweaver, which can be just as useful.

White is perhaps the best option for background color. White backgrounds make copy much more easily readable and give your site a more mature look. However, intricate background images are often difficult to pull off; more often than not they appear sloppy and distracting. For backgrounds, simpler is usually preferable.

Being in charge of your website and website design, will call for you to have your own secluded office space. Using an office space helps you avoid distractions and work more efficiently. You want to build yourself a work space suited to the needs of web design, where all the tools you’ll need are within easy reach.

If video-hosting is something you’d like to include on your site, you’ll first need to ensure that your web host accepts the idea. There are a large number of hosts in the world that do not permit video hosting to be on their servers. This is because the FLV files can take up a lot of server space, so it is prudent that you ask first before you waste your time.

While there will be plenty of attractive designs and strategies, you need to use your own imagination when designing your site. Come up with your own ideas and features or improve upon some that you admired on other sites. By doing this, you are taking advantage of a wide range of web design options.

Whatever your design is like aesthetically, be sure all your files are small. This is because the speed of your website loading is directly influenced by the file sizes. You want your site to load as quick as possible. The other factor to bear in mind is not all visitors access through high-speed connections. Run tests to ensure that even dial-up users report a smooth user experience.

Concept sketches are a fantastic design tool. You should take advantage of them for the initial phases of the web design process. This tool can be effective for designing the look and feel of the website, and also identifying any functional requirements that your website might have. Using this tool is a fantastic way to begin the design process.

When you include videos on your site, you need to be aware that not everyone has a high Internet bandwidth. While videos and graphic-heavy layouts might looks nice, they will only serve to annoy people if it is too slow to pull up. Videos with extremely high speeds like this will load slowly and buffer frequently for visitors on slow connections.

Make it easy for visitors to back out of a process if they change their minds. This could be a form that they have been filling out, registering for newsletters or emails, or even browsing the website for certain topics or archives. Forcing your user to complete an action they don’t wish to will ensure they never sign up for anything on your site again, nor are they likely to return at all.

Always be sure to make a visual sitemap. This is useful in planning ahead with accuracy. By using this, you’ll discover how the structure of your website is coming along. This will help you locate any area on your website that needs to be improved, as well as areas of neglect. There isn’t anything like a crystal clear visual of your project.

Besides the simplicity that you can see once you learn a bit about it, one very satisfying thing about web design is the great power it offers you to convert ideas into reality with nothing more than a little effort and software. The tips above are various methods you can use to create a great site. Follow the above directions and you will be able to create the website of your dreams.

Richard Vanderhurst

Web Design Tips That Will Make Your Site Stand Out

Hiring a web design company to handle your website can be an incredibly costly venture. You might not even be happy with the results. You might not be able to get a design firm to know exactly what you want. You are the only person who knows exactly what you want. So when you want to design a website, use these web design tips to create something you’ll be proud of.

Make sure you have enough details on your company page to allow your visitors to know more about who you are and what you can offer them. These pages are often dull and uninteresting. Try to make yours interesting! Let people see a bit of your personal history. Try including items like, how you entered web design, who inspires you, and what your wishes for your business are.

If you are designing a very large site, you should always include search capabilities. This is commonly located in the topmost-right corner of the screen as an empty bar, which users can insert a search term or phrase. You can get a search bar from Google or FreeFind.

Make sure that you thoroughly check the code on each webpage that you design. If you use an WYSIWYG editor, your code is not clean. If you use those programs, take an extra step to validate your code with a validation service. The W3C website has a tool you can use for free, so make sure to bookmark it.

Use Photoshop if you want to create stellar websites. Using a program like Photoshop can help amateur web designers create professional looking sites really fast. You will expend a lot of extra time and lessen your chances of creating a professional site if you neglect investing in programs such as Photoshop.

Making sure to proofread may be obvious, but it’s vital to the success of your website. Proofread every page you add to your site for misspellings and grammatical errors before you send it to your server and make it available to your audience. If you post sloppily written content or content riddled with mistakes, you will appear extremely unprofessional. You’re likely to lose many visitors quickly if your site’s appearance isn’t professional looking.

User-friendly web design programs, known as development platforms, can make building websites easier, but they are just not as trustworthy as hand-written code. What a platform does is help you paste the code onto features that you have made. If you hope to gain a real understanding of coding, though, then a text editor is a good learning tool.

Selecting a professional looking font is an important web design consideration. People judge your sites professionalism by the fonts you use. Fonts that are overly artistic may seem like a good idea, but often aren’t accessible on all computers. If they don’t have that font on their computer, it might be subset to their default font. This often looks terrible.

Domain auction websites can be excellent sources for domain names. Check out a domain site like SEDO to see if domain names they may have for sale would be suitable for your website. Although it’s sometimes pricey, the advantages of a relevant domain name are worth every penny.

Pay attention to the way the different colors you use on your website interact. If the text fades into the background due to poor contrast, the text will be hard to read. Choose a dark color for your text, and use a lighter color for your backgrounds. Ask someone to look at your color schemes to ensure you are making the right choice.

Keep personal information handy in the event that it must be re-entered by a repeat visitor of your website. For instance, if a user registers at your site and another form requires the same information again, be certain your website preserves this data to prevent them the useless and annoying hassle of filling it in again. Developing “sticky” data like this streamlines the user experience, and your visitors will likely appreciate the convenience.

You should aim high when setting your goals for your web design projects. While the “perfect website” doesn’t really exist, the mindset of striving towards creating the best possible website will help you to continually improve. This can help you design any kind of website.

The use of captchas can be beneficial, and they should be utilized for certain tasks such as user registration. However, you should limit their use in general, and avoid them whenever possible. The captcha makes visitors do too much work. Most visitors will leave a webpage that requires too much personal information or the completion of difficult tasks.

Your background is the keystone of your design. Your background should not be too distracting and allow your reader to read the text easily. Choose a background that is not too distracting for your readers, and that goes well with the rest of your design.

One way to simplify the web design process is to collect a wide variety of checklists and cheat sheets, that can be looked at when there is an issue with your site. These lists can also help you improve your site.

Let visitors cancel actions if they want to. An action may refer to signing up for e-mail notifications, newsletter subscriptions or filling out web forms. If you don’t let visitors back out of an incomplete action, it can be perceived as forcing them to do something, which will probably make them go elsewhere.

The design process doesn’t stop once your website has gone live. Be prepared to keep busy with your site. You don’t have to constantly update it, but you must do regular updates. This is especially true if you’re hosting videos or working with current events. When you update your website, it’s not the same as updating your blog. You may need to implement a more diligent regime to be successful.

One of the most appealing aspects of web design, besides its simplicity, is the fact that it is fairly easy to turn what you envision into a real and functional site. The tips above are various methods you can use to create a great site. Keep these tips in mind as you create.