A lot of people are getting into web design yet they aren’t aware of all the techniques involved. Are you looking for a job in the world of web design or are you simply trying to create a site? Use the following suggestions as to what is required to make a great website.
When doing web design, use the appropriate graphics. Do not use bitmap for your images as they take up too much space. Consider PNG files for non-photographic images, text buttons or screenshots that require over 256 colors. If not, use a GIF. For photos, JPEG images work well.
Display a tagline in a prominent area on your page. This tagline should give visitors an idea of what your site is about. This allows them to quickly grasp whether or not your site has information relevant to their search.
On the Internet, few things are more important to users than speed and efficiency, especially where page loading times are concerned. Visitors can quickly become impatient and leave your site if it loads too slowly. They will often move on to another site and usually never return to yours.
Be aware of the background on your website. There are certain websites that utilize animated GIFs for their backgrounds. While such backgrounds can be attractive in some cases, they can also make it difficult to read the content on your website. Pick a background that meshes with your site, not against it, and your viewers will have a much easier time understanding what you want to say.
Use shortcuts. Nearly all facets of web design have shortcuts you can take, so the time you take to learn them once can save you time on everything over and over in the future. For example, you can use certain HTML codes to make very quick changes without needing to re-load.
Optimize your website for older IE versions. Most people have a love-hate relationship with IE; however, many people are still using it, including older versions. They don’t offer a lot of elements that comply with basic web standard, so customizations may be in order. One tip of utter importance when dealing with the older Internet Explorer browsers is to educate yourself on the bug referred to as box model that haunted them for years.
Make your website as fast as possible. People are more likely to leave your site if the load time is too long. Minimize the amount of Flash, scripts and graphics on your site. Optimize the site with HTML, SSI files, caching options and minimize CSS and JS coding.
Choose your fonts carefully. You should only choose fonts that look professional and are easy to read. Fonts say a lot about the professionalism of a site and the business it represents. Avoid fancy fonts that are hard to read or unprofessional fonts such as Comic Sans. If they don’t have that font on their computer, it might be subset to their default font. This can make your website look a lot worse.
While creating your website, you should not feel forced to have your website occupy the entire available space. Utilizing all pixels available can cause your site to feel cluttered. When you space things out in an appropriate way and have a sense of organization, this will make users feel like they are in control. In some cases, empty space can be just as valuable as content.
The design tools which come with your web hosting account are a great way to practice your skills, but they are no replacement for real design know-how. Try to integrate your personality into the site by adding and tweaking things without just relying on dragging and dropping things your web host provides.
Before you purchase hosting for your site, know exactly what you need and what packages provide it. You will need to know the following: bandwidth, disk space, CPU usage, and any other items that are part of the package price. Have an idea what is being offered.
Good web design hinges on the quality of your research. Become educated about your particular niche so you can appeal to your target audience. You must think of ways in which you can design your website, in order to maximize your efforts in reaching your target audience. This is an efficient way to look at things.
You should use a visible tagline for all your pages. These taglines should be in text that is large and bold so that they are the first thing a viewer will notice when he or she follows your links. It has to explain what the page is about so your visitor can quickly decide to stick around or not.
Check with your host to make sure video hosting is allowed if you have the intent of hosting videos on your site. There are a large number of hosts in the world that do not permit video hosting to be on their servers. The FLV files are big and take up a lot of space on servers, so check to make sure it is allowed before wasting your efforts.
Use the copy and paste features of your computer when you are making multiple pages as part of a sub category on your site. Do not waste time by creating original HTML code for each page on your site. Instead, duplicate the main code, make any necessary adjustments, then save the code as a unique file. Doing this will save you a ton of time!
Most of the amazing domain names have already been claimed. You may want to consider buying a domain name from an auction site such as Sedo. You will be able to find many wonderful domain names that either are for sale, abandoned or have already been sold.
For every page you design, make sure you validate it. WYSIWYG editors often add a bunch of garbage code throughout your page, cluttering your HTML and slowing your load times. If those programs are used, be sure that you take the extra effort of utilizing a validation service to validate your code. The W3C website has a tool you can use for free, so make sure to bookmark it.
After reading this article, you are now ready to begin developing web pages. Try everything you learned here, but don’t stop! Keep learning in order to continue your success in web design!
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