The design principles used to construct a website can have an immediate impact on the way that visitors to the site perceive and react to it. First impressions are important, this makes it imperative that your web design is enticing and doesn’t encourage people to leave your site instantly. The article below is here to guide you through the process of designing a good website.
Choosing the right graphics can either make or break a website. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don’t work well, PNGs work fine. You have two choices for your non-photographic images. An image using 256 colors or more works well as a PNG, GIF works for the others. When using photos, make them JPEGs.
The faster a web page loads, the more it will be appreciated. You should minimize the loading time of your site’s pages. Your visitors are more likely to lose interest in your website and leave the page if they have to wait for a few minutes before having access to the content.
Functional websites work out for all visitors, regardless of their browser, so it’s essential that your website is tested across all the major platforms. Even though your website may display perfectly on Internet Explorer, this doesn’t mean that it will look the same on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. Verify the way in which your pages load in all major browsers prior to your official launch.
Pay attention to the background of your website. Some sites have moving GIF backgrounds, which can be great at times, but can make your text difficult to read at other times. Use a light colored background which fits into your site’s color palette.
Learn about shortcuts, and use them often. Many aspect of webdesign are not as hard as they seem and have shortcuts on how to do them. You can even find HTML codes that help you make quick changes.
Avoid the use of pop-up advertising. Your customers will hate being flooded with popup ads. Many people will close a site immediately if it uses pop-ups, even if it’s a site run by a well-known brand or company. Keep your customers happy, by steering clear of these annoying ads. Is your host making you use pop-ups? Time for a new host.
Meta Tags
Good meta tagging practices will help your website draw in larger numbers of visitors. Quality meta tags will help search engines index and present your website to their users. Non descriptive or inaccurate meta tags will result in low visibility for your website.
Keep things as simple as possible when setting up the design of your site. How your navigation links are placed on your site will impact how long visitors stay on your site. You must provide the user with easy navigation to create the right experience.
Text Content
Always use text content for links on your pages. Links with content are helpful for visitors. Make sure your visitors do not click links accidentally by adding useful text content.
When you design your website, remember that you do have have to fill up every bit of space. If you are using every single available pixel, the website may feel extremely 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. There are many cases in which empty space is actually more valuable than other content.
Keep your early site building efforts small, so you can more easily identify what is working, and what is not. Besides keeping them small, your initial efforts should also be simple. Avoid complex multimedia and advanced structures to begin with, and stick with basic pages of text and pictures.
Try to begin your site with minimal content. This helps build a niche and gets them focused on whatever message you are delivering instead of spending wasted time jumping from page to page looking for what interests them. You don’t need a lot of stuff that will overwhelm you and confuse visitors when they arrive on your site.
You can test out web design effectiveness through task-based usability assignments. Can your users find what they want? If your website is well designed, the user should have no difficulty completing the task. On the other hand, if it is not, the task can give you some insight as to which areas of your website could use improvement.
Internet surfers notice website design immediately, and usually make a stay or surf elsewhere decision within second. Make your first impression attractive. The tips that you have previously received, contained the advice you need to design websites that are going to be popular with viewers.