So, you have a website all sketched out, but you don’t know how to actually build it. You need to put both photos and videos on the web, but making that happen is proving to be more difficult than expected. There are several tips that can help you to realize that vision. Read the tips below to learn what you are missing.
People don’t like to wait when they browse the Internet, so your pages need to load fast even on slow connections. A visitor who has to wait for pages to load is likely to seek information and help elsewhere. If your site has a reputation for loading slowly, it will be difficult to attract repeat visitors.
TIP! Ease of navigation is an important factor in how appealing visitors find your website. Ensure that links are easy discovered and displayed in a prominent location.
As you construct your site, be conscious of the colors you use together. Your text must be easily readable and not disappear into your background. Choose a dark color for your text, and use a lighter color for your backgrounds. Ask someone to look at your color schemes to make sure you are choosing something harmonious.
You should always take time to removed old, irrelevant content. If your website is advertising a festival that occurred three months ago, your readers will just leave. Internet users want to have access to the latest information and read websites with regular updates. Create a timeline for your updates, and clean up any old promotions or information that is not current.
Do not use pop-ups on your site. Viewers hate pop-ups; they are annoying and unprofessional. Even large, popular websites can lose visitors by mistakenly employing pop-up ads. Make sure your customers are happy by eliminating these pesky ads from your site. Is your host making you use pop-ups? Time for a new host.
Website Visitors
JavaScript is a great tool, but don’t overuse it. Some of your website visitors may not have JavaScript, and others will not want to update it on a regular basis. Web browsers are all different, and each comes out with new versions pretty regularly. You can’t expect that your website visitors are going to have the most updated versions of their browsers. Also, consider that JavaScript isn’t regularly enabled in everyone’s browser. Either of these problems can make the visitor unable to use your site.
You can create a site using free software. You can use a lot of free tools to assist your building of your website, so check into the software that is available to you. Hit your favorite search engine and do research to find a piece of software that suits your needs.
TIP! Use Photoshop to create professional looking graphics for use on your website. Using programs like PS can make amateur sites look professional, fast.
White is generally a safe background color to use when designing a professional website. Few visitors take issue with a white background, which looks professional or, at worst, neutral. Text content is also more clear on a white background. Gaudy backgrounds, by contrast, often blend in with the content, and make it appear to be hastily put together. Make your background as simple as possible.
Web Browsers
Eliminate pop-up windows from all pages on your site to create a user-friendly experience. Most people will be turned off by a site that pop’s windows up in their face. Every pop-up window you throw in front of your website visitors increases the likelihood that they will abandon your website in frustration. Once they leave, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be coming back.
TIP! Good meta tags are a quick way to ensure your website makes it to a good rank on search engines. You need to spend some time on creating high quality meta tags so that search engines can classify your site properly.
See how your design does on different web browsers. Different browsers will read and display a site in different ways, which can have some unintended results for site visitors. There are now many websites that you can visit to find out which web browsers are most commonly used by internet users. Make sure to beta-test your site on all popular browsers, including those used on mobile devices.
Make sure you have checked for links that could possibly be broken. The best time to do this is just before you FTP the page over to the server. Visitors who encounter broken links and errors will not stay on your site long enough to view your product. Make sure everything is in working order to keep this from happening.
Put some thought into the “About Us” page. These pages are often dull and uninteresting. Make yours exciting and interesting! Try to give people a little look what your personal background looks like, try to show what made you get into web designing, who or what inspired it, and what you would like to achieve with your business.
TIP! Learning how to design good websites becomes even simpler the more you do it. Use simple programming languages to learn the basics and get started today.
Hosting your site yourself is not really a great idea, no matter what amount of money you’ve decided to invest in it. Even if you create the basic design yourself, do not fall into the trap of spending the inordinate amounts of time necessary to host it yourself.
Skill Level
Know what you are getting for your money when selecting a hosting service. It’s important to understand what your needs are in regards to CPU, RAM, bandwidth, hard drive space and specific software needs like PHP or MySQL. Make sure you get what you expect.
TIP! Do not overlook the valuable knowledge that can be gained on web design through printed books. Stick to books for beginning web designers until you’ve mastered the basics, so that you won’t miss anything you need to know as you study web design.
Invest in some books on the topic of website development. Buy books that are appropriate to your skill level. You do want to increase your skill level, but since web design skills build on each other, missing things can be problematic.
Everyone has heard about Photoshop, and they know that they have to learn it in order to become successful with web design. Dreamweaver is less popular but is easier to master and is filled with useful tools designed for webmasters.
You should use a visible tagline for all your pages. This slogan should be prominently displayed near the top of the page and be in bold text, so that visitors can’t miss it. This tagline let’s people know what the page is about and whether or not they should stay there or not.
TIP! Remember, designing a website does not need to be expensive. There are certainly expensive design tools out there, but many companies offer software with similar features at a fraction of the cost.
Talk to other web designers to make sure that you have adequately learned what you needed to in order to build your site. You want to ensure that you remember everything you learned. It can slow you down quite a bit if you have to review what you’ve learned while building a website.
As you can see, designing a website is not that difficult. There are some bottom-line fundamentals that deal with web page design and once you learn them, it helps you put the entire group into its proper place. Use the advice that has been been provided to you, in order to create the best website design possible.
If you are considering hosting videos on a website, be sure to check with the web host to make sure that it is allowed. It’s not uncommon for hosts to prohibit videos being uploaded to their servers. 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.
