Is it your goal to be a productive web designer? Is your lack of design skills getting in the way of achieving your goals? If you want to improve your website design skills, this article is chock full of beginner-friendly tips.
Help your visitors navigate your page via fixed position navigation. This technique locks the navigation panel on the site in place whenever the user scrolls on the page. This is ideal for both visitors and marketers alike, as desired actions are executed much more quickly.
Check your site in all of the different browsers. Your content may show very differently to customers using alternate browsers. This means that you need to understand which browsers are most widely in use today, and check the site in each one. You will want to have a person using a different computer operating system check on your site as well.
Scour forums for ideas and instructions on how to get the most out of website development. With a quick search on Google, you can uncover plenty of information that won’t cost you a dime to learn.
Be aware of your background. You don’t want your text to be hard to read! A distracting background is…well, distracting. Choose backgrounds that coordinate with your site, rather than clashing with it, and your message will be much more clear to your visitors.
Make use of keyword research. The focus of your website should always be to give your users a quality experience, but you cannot do that if you are never seen. Knowing the right keywords will help you bring people that have an interest in the things you have on your site.
Make sure your website content is both interesting and compelling. It is the value of the content, not necessarily a flashy design, that keeps visitors coming back again and again. A website that provides information that is both, useful and updated, will be the most effective. Readers will find information they find helpful, which will cause them to return in the future.
White is a great choice for a background color. It’s simplistic, yet has a lot of potential at adding flare and color elsewhere. White backgrounds make your content easier to read, and give your website a more trustworthy feel if you want a professional look. Colors, patterns or other designs are distracting and don’t have a place on a website. Backgrounds should be simple and subtle.
Broken Links
Review your site for broken links regularly. The best time to do this is just before you FTP the page over to the server. You want to avoid broken links, because they make your visitors especially frustrated by promising certain content and then failing to deliver it. So you don’t run into problems, make sure you check to see if everything works.
If you end up with designer’s block, look around the internet. Look through the millions of websites online to get great ideas about how to design your own. Look for a website that is interesting to you and use some of their ideas. Just remember that borrowing others’ ideas isn’t enough to make your own page successful. Make those elements better so your site truly shines.
Having a website counter at the bottom of your page is really an unattractive feature. Take it off of your site if you want to look contemporary. Get rid of visitor counters and encourage social media interaction instead.
Most hosts provide design tools that make building a simple site easy, but these tools will not cover you when you want more advanced features. Eventually you want to incorporate your own ideas into the site, which means lots of tinkering and experimenting with different things without having to rely on the simple functions of the site-builder you get from the host provider.
When you are in the process of choosing your web host, you want to be certain that you understand all facets of the package. Take note of things like bandwidth, disk space and CPU usage. Have an idea what is being offered.
Make sure the entire website is entirely read over and over again to insure it looks professional and well-designed. It should be easy for people to read. If your site is rife with errors, it makes you look like a rank amateur. Visitors will dismiss you immediately.
Because you now have more knowledge about website development, are you more confident about your design abilities? Otherwise, you may wish to revisit this article later, or perhaps to seek additional resources to help clarify any misunderstandings.