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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Web Design Tips That Will Make Your Site Stand Out

By Derek V Lamington

Using successful web design practices can help guarantee you the creation of a popular website. Good web design not only makes your website more visually appealing, but also more comfortable to use, and gives it a more genuine feel. Your site will get more traffic and more repeat visitors. Keep reading for a collection of tips you will find useful through the process of designing your site.

It is important that any logo contained within your site, links back to the home page. It is common these days for sites to have a logo or image that visitors can click on to return to the home page. Imagine your reader's frustration as they click away with nothing happening! They might think it's broken, and that your site isn't as good as they thought. Having a logo that is clickable will make site navigation easier.

Speed is vital online, so be sure your pages load quickly. 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.

For some people, their bandwidth is very low, and you need to consider this when putting videos up on your site. You may want to change your videos to 5,000 kb/s, but that still can be much quicker than someone's internet connection. These people will have to wait for a long time to watch the video, and the video may freeze frequently while waiting for more data to load.

Be careful when introducing new colors into the design of your website. Your text must be easily readable and not disappear into your background. Reading dark text on lighter backgrounds is simpler than the opposite. If you're unsure about the color combo you've used, solicit feedback from a trusted friend before the site goes live.

Keep in mind that the site you create does not have to be built entirely by you. Web design includes web programming, interface design, creating content, as well as search engine optimization. You should never feel embarrassed asking for help when you do not know how to do something. You can pick and choose which areas you need help in and farm it out accordingly.

Most web designers find it handy to keep a file of checklists and cheat sheets for easy reference, when solving website problems. This will also provide you with inspiration on how to make your site better.

Buying books on web design is money well spent. Choose books adapted to your current level of skills and very comprehensive. Read reviews before buying anything.

Your computer's copy/paste capabilities are some of your most powerful tools when you're building a website with many very similar sub-pages. Rather than making a fresh HTML code for each page that you have, simply copy the most important part of the code, change it in certain places, and save it under a new file name. By doing this, you can continue to use the master copy over and over again.

You can get ideas from other websites, but incorporate them into a vision all your own. Create your own features and use what you see on other sites as a base for your ideas. Implementing this technique will help you to create a quality website.

Perform a thorough error check of your site, including checking for broken links. Complete your error check before uploading your site and going live. This is necessary because when you have visitors come to your site they will find that the information they want to see is not available anymore and if this is to happen a lot on your site, they will leave. Save yourself some headaches by making sure that everything is working as it should.

Do not use JavaScript more than you have to. Some of your website visitors may not have JavaScript, and others will not want to update it on a regular basis. Web browsers have different capabilities, and they all have new versions that come out regularly. Everyone who visits your site will not always have an up to date browser. Also, everyone doesn't enable JavaScript on their browsers. Both of these things mean that these users are prevented from using your site.

From the suggestions outlined in the above article, you should now be all set to tackle the design of your web site. Establish a budget, ask for help from professionals if you need to, and start drawing sketches. You can create sites that fill your needs without a lot of money by starting now!
 
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