When many people hear the term “web design”, they often think of hours of time and energy spend writing long lines of code and creating graphical images for a website. Web design is easier than most people believe, and the web design tips in the following article will prove just that.
Incorporate a tagline prominently on your website. This tagline should give visitors an idea of what your site is about. Use a clear line to keep the visitors on your website.
Avoid useless scripts. Scripts like counters and date/time scripts don’t really serve any purpose, and since they are all JavaScript, can add a few kilobytes to the page’s file size. Getting rid of these elements also frees up space on the homepage. Replace those useless scripts with useful content that keeps users coming back.
Ensure your site can pass the NoScript test. Download NoScript and activate the Firefox extension. This will tell you if your website can be read. When your site is just a blank page, you have a problem.
Do not use a lot of graphics. They are good for making your site more professional, but too much looks messy. Your graphics should SEO not only be decorative; they must also be true improvements. Having the right amount of graphics that does not impede on the overall website design is key to how well the site looks.
Break up long text blocks. Having a huge wave of text is unnecessary for any site, especially when you can break it up by using images, or even separating it into different pages. Boring your viewers will only make them leave, so keep things as simple and fresh as possible.
While you might be inclined to add a lot of bells and whistles to your website, flashing graphics, loud music and neon colors will just distract from the purpose of your website. Visitors who are bombarded by too many sights and sounds might be inclined to leave your website before they even start browsing. Keep the colors simple and the content relevant and your website design will be a winner.
To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k.
Be sure your website works both with and without the “www” prefix. Some people will type this in before they head to your site as a force of habit, and some may not. You should make sure that customers will be directed to your site either way, or you may have some confused people on your hands.
Make sure your navigation is simple to use. Navigation links help ensure a visitor can successfully navigate the website. Never forget that your design as far as ease of navigation is the most important thing you can do to retain and build traffic.
Have clear navigation. When a visitor comes to your site, make sure they can go through your site. You must have clear navigation to do this. Have all important links in prominent places. Try linking many pages in your site. Allow information be found from every part of the site.
Make sure all of your webpages actually have titles, and make sure they are descriptive. A surprising number of webpages out there are called “untitled document” or “new document”. This not only denies visitors a useful piece of information to remember your site, but also absolutely destroys your SEO, since search engines weight page titles heavily when ranking sites.
Do not forget to include a site map. This accomplishes two purposes. They make your website easily understandable, first of all. This allows visitors to find links to topics on your site that interest them on one single page. Site maps are also great if you’re into search engine optimization. This will help people to find what they want in a short period of time.
As stated before, people think of hours of coding and creating images when they think about web design. They don’t realize that web design isn’t as complicated as they believe. Using the tips from this article, anyone will see how easy web design is and use it to create their own website.
