Have you decided to design a website, but are unsure of how to do so? Having a website which can play videos and display photos is your goal, but making it a reality requires more knowledge than you have. Luckily, the following web design advice will be useful. Read a few tips below, and learn more about how to create a site worth visiting.
Be careful with the color combinations you use when designing your website. You need to ensure that the text on your site is easily readable against your chosen background. Dark text colors on light backgrounds are usually easier to read compared to the other way around. When in doubt about the effectiveness of your color choices, solicit the opinions of friends.
Create a comprehensive “About Us” page. Many websites that you see will have boring pages for this area. Crank it up a bit! Provide some insight for your visitors; tell them how and why you built your site and what goals you want it to reach for your company.
When developing your website, consistently use fonts and colors throughout your website. If you change the fonts and color on every page, anyone looking at your site can get confused, and they may start to wonder if they are still on your site at all. Keep your graphics consistent on every page to avoid this problem. For best results, utilize a consistent color scheme and font in all your company literature and stationery.
While overall design of your site is important, people come to your site primarily for the content. Stay true to your original purpose and use imagery to help you achieve that; in other words, keep design simple and make sure it communicates your message. A page that is simple and effective will load more quickly.
If users want to, let them cancel an action. Types of such actions would include registering an email, filling out forms, or browsing your site for archives or topics. Visitors do not appreciate not being able to cancel things that they are not interested in completing, and they may not wish to return to your site for future purchases.
Think about the global accessibility of your content. If you are using dates, times, measurements or currencies, make sure that they are easy to understand by people from all countries. Most sites won’t be viewed by just locals, so people in many countries need to be able to understand and relate to the content.
White can be a highly effective color for your background. White pages are professional looking and don’t distract your visitors. You will come across as an amateur if your site design is cluttered and distracting. It is best to stick with a simple background when you are designing your website.
Build a microsite at first, as this will help you get an overall impression of your current strengths and weaknesses as a web designer. If you begin by creating only a few pages, it will be easier to gradually build your confidence.
If you want your website to get more visitors, take care to use relevant, up-to-date meta tags on every page of your site. Good meta tags will help search engines categorize your site properly. Tags that incorrectly label your site can cause visitors searching for your site’s niche to not find the site, reducing the number of hits.
Retain user information so that people don’t have to waste valuable time re-typing information into forms. When visitors may be filling out multiple forms or information pieces, have the data fields retain their information, and auto-fill subsequent forms that are filled out. “Sticky” data will ensure that the user fills out all the forms they need to instead of leaving when it becomes too difficult.
Learning how to design good websites becomes even simpler the more you do it. Start simple pages with C+ and HTML to test your fundamentals. It’s never too late to start practicing, so start today.
You should have people beta testing your website as you build it. Each time a new feature is created, have someone check it out and let you know their thoughts. Things that may seem inconsequential to you, such as graphics that load slowly, may appear to be major obstacles to other people. Feedback from others will be invaluable to you as you build your site.
If you think about placing advertisements on your site, make sure that you do not include too many. You will come across as being unprofessional if there are too many distracting advertisements. Only include the advertisements that are important to you and your site.
A smart tip for those who want to learn about website design is to make use of all the resources available. All types of magazines and books exist for designing a site, and these cover all aspects of web design. Picking up a copy of one of these books or magazines will teach you a lot about effective web design.
A newsletter can help you to get more repeat visitors to you website. If you have your clients subscribe to updates, they will have a reason to come back again and again. Put the form for signing up in a prominent location, such as a sidebar, and use it to compile a list of visitors who opt in to your newsletter. Send the newsletter only to people who opt-in or you could get in trouble for spam!
Learning from the experts can be done in person, online through chat or email, through their personal or professional blog or even through books they’ve written. Keep this up and you could become an expert one day.
As you can see, designing a site isn’t hard. Take the time to understand the basic principles of design because those lessons will be useful across the entire spectrum of the technology. Use the tips that have been provided in this article, to get a grasp on basic website design so you can improve your site and increase business too.
