It doesn’t matter if you are creating your fiftieth website or your very first, design is arguably the most important consideration in creation of any site. Creating a site that is pleasing to the eye, user friendly, and has relevant content will more than likely cause your visitors to return. Continue onto the article below for some excellent website creation tips that will help you build a nice-looking and productive site.
If you want your site to bring in more visitors, you should ensure it’s simple to navigate. Links should be displayed where users will find them easily. Menus can make navigation on your site easier. Ensure that there are links to all of your main pages, such as the home and contact pages, in a prominent location on every page.
It’s a good idea to set up your site so that it can retain a copy of user information that must be entered repeatedly. When a visitor fills out a registration form on your website, for instance, your site should hang onto that information, and use it to fill out data fields for the visitor on subsequent interactive pages ahead of time. Your clients will thank you for saving them the time it takes to fill in information that they have previously done on your site.
Photoshop is a good program for creating great content for your new web site. It is also novice friendly. Using this type of program will help a website look more professional in a short amount of time. Not having this software can lead to a design which looks amateurish and untrusthworthy.
It does not matter how you have designed your website; you have to make sure that every file has a small file size. This is because the speed of your website loading is directly influenced by the file sizes. It is always a good idea for your website to load as quickly as possible. Remember, some of your website’s visitors will not be using a fast Internet connection. Test your site to make sure that it loads up quickly, even when accessed on a dial up connection.
Skip the pop-up windows. They may seem helpful, but they are seen as more annoying by visitors than not. Many visitors to your site may simply exit the site when faced with a pop-up. If this happens, they are unlikely to return.
Meta Tags
Good meta tagging practices will help your website draw in larger numbers of visitors. High quality meta tags assist search engines in understanding the topic of your website. If you use poorly constructed meta tags that don’t reflect your content accurately, you won’t get much traffic.
Put together a nice page about you or your organization and title it “About” or “About Us.” Some websites “About Us” pages are very dull and boring. Make yours exciting and interesting! Aim to give visitors a small glimpse of your personal background. Demonstrate how you began website development, the people who inspired you to do this, and what your business goals are.
Use fonts that are both easy to read, and professional. Many times you can tell a site is not professional because of the fonts they have chosen. Some fonts, such as comic sans, are ones that you want to stay away from. Unusual fonts can be classified as subsets on a viewer’s screen. Sometimes this looks worse, but often times it helps the reader who otherwise may not have been able to read your website clearly.
Be sure there are no broken links on your website. Do this often, and especially before uploading any of it to the server. This is important, as visitors who click on your links expecting useful information, only to find a 404 page, will leave your site in disgust. You can prevent this by frequently checking that all links still work.
While utilizing the design tools of a host to get your website started is a fine idea, never rely on these tools completely. Your site should reflect you and your personality, so you want to make sure it’s not too generic.
Even if you have decided to invest a lot of money into your website, hosting a site yourself isn’t the best idea. Design your website as much as you can by yourself, but have someone else host it, so that you do not have to worry about its security and safety.
There are many good books which can help you learn more about website creation. Be sure to start out reading books that are at your current level. You want to learn more, though you do not want to skip important information as you are learning, so that you miss something that can help you become amazing at web designing.
Use a basic, simple layout for your website so it’s easy to change and expand. You should start with the basics, then advance to the more complex functions as you improve your skills and get more experience with the entire process of web designing.
Avoid the use of CAPTCHAs whenever you can. This causes your viewers to believe they have to do some type of difficult problem just for viewing a webpage. Unless your visitor is already devoted to your site, he or she will likely leave your page and go somewhere else.
Check with your web host before adding videos to your site, as some hosts will not allow it. It is not uncommon for hosts to forbid users to host video content. Those FLV files absorb a great deal of server space that simply may not be available to you. Before putting the effort into this feature, make sure you’re not wasting your time.
With these tips, you can design a website that does what you want it to – by fostering a good relationship with your site visitors by providing a site that is easy to look at and easy to use. When you do this, you can’t help but achieve online success in more ways than one.
