The concept of attending to your own website design is both exciting and frightening, particularly if you are lacking in experience. Read the following article to find out what you need to familiarize yourself with and what you should aim for when designing your site.
Make sure your website passes a test by NoScript. Firefox has a simple extension called NoScript that will perform the test. It will be normal for some content not to work, like the ordering system, but a blank page is a red flag.
Make sure the combination of colors your site uses is attractive and makes the site easy to read. You need to ensure that the text on your site is easily readable against your chosen background. A dark color for foreground text against a light background is often more readable for most audiences. When in doubt about the effectiveness of your color choices, solicit the opinions of friends.
Speed is king when it comes to webpages, so be sure that your images are loading quickly. If someone has to wait while your site loads, there’s a chance they will get impatient and go to another site, and they might not visit your site again.
Easy navigation is critical to keeping visitors on your site. Make all links prominent and easily located. A navigation menu will also help visitors locate exactly what they’re looking for. Have links to the main pages available on every page of your site so visitors can always find their way around.
If you want to maximize the potential of your website design, ensure that your pages appear correctly on all web browsers, so any visitor can view them. Different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome may not display content the same way; what works in one might not work in another. Check how each page displays in the major browsers before your site goes live.
Keep page sizes down. Not every person using Internet has a high-speed connection, so if a site takes longer to load, they won’t be as interested in it. You will want your users to have a great overall experience.
Let your users have the option of canceling any action if they wish to do so. For example, put a “clear” button on a form, an unsubscribe link on all newsletters and a “cancel” button on orders. When you do not allow visitors to cancel something they do not wish to complete, you are forcing them into something, which can prove detrimental to fostering return visits and/or purchases.
If you get stuck in designing your website, remember that you can always search online for some excellent examples. You can get inspiration for any one of the millions of sites already out there. Pick a site you like, figure out why you like it, and see if you can implement those techniques into your site. Just remember that borrowing others’ ideas isn’t enough to make your own page successful. You must make improvements to those ideas.
Proofread all of your site’s content. This will make it easier for people to read. A site with errors is not very professional and it will make people want to stay away from your site.
Avoid the use of CAPTCHAs whenever you can. CAPTCHAs annoy visitors because they have to complete some useless task just to get the information they want or post a comment. All but a site’s biggest fans will leave if they have to fill out too many CAPTCHAs.
If you use FileZilla, be certain that your username, proper port and domain are all programmed into its quick menu settings. Doing so will make it possible for you to simply choose your personalized settings upon logging back into the server. This can save a ton of time.
When looking to host videos on your site, you need to check with your particular web host to ensure that it’s allowed. There are some hosts that forbid hosting videos. 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.
Improve your time budgeting abilities if you plan on creating a website in a reasonable time frame. There are many small tasks involved in web page design. This makes procrastination very tempting. Before you know it, those little tasks have piled up and have become overwhelming. Finish any tasks whenever they come up.
Website development is a fun and exciting way to reach your target market and promote your product or company. When done correctly, a good website is a great add-on to give you the ammunition needed to promote your business. So begin today by incorporating some of these tips into your own web page design projects and develop a successful site.