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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Simple Suggestions For Mastering Effective Web Design

By Odelia Morar

If you're a web designer make sure that you create a work space for yourself that will offer the least amount of distractions. This will allow you to focus on your work and will result in a more productive and efficient business atmosphere.

Good web design includes some white space in your overall layout. The most important thing on your site is the quality content and the effective use of white space on your page will direct the users' eye to your content. Avoid cluttering your page with useless information just to fill up every space.

A great tip for every web designer out there is to research their target audience. Understanding what type of people will be using the site is an excellent way to decide how to build it. Make sure it is a site that the target audience will be comfortable using.

Those of you who are looking for a solid web design tip might want to look into top level domains. Most people are only familiar with the popular .com, .net and .org, so make sure that these are available for your website in order to get as much traffic as possible.

If you plan on having a commercial site, you should seriously consider buying your own web hosting. Most free host sites force you to display their advertisements, which is counter-intuitive if you are attempting to sell something as well. Purchase your own hosting to avoid this advertising hassle, so that you can choose your own ads.

Optimize every image you use for the web. If you look through the internet, you can find a lot of examples of images that are too large and they slow down the webpage's load time. Make sure you have optimized each image you use. Save the image as a JPEG or GIF and aim for the file size to be somewhere between 5k and 20k.

Focusing on your target audience is important even for website design. For instance, if you're designing a site in order to sell winter coats, you're not exactly going to have a beach themed background with Joe Strummer tunes playing upon entry. Keep your site closely related to its targeted audience.

Make sure that you use the right anchor text. The anchor text of a link should clearly describe what the visitor should expect to see when he clicks on the link. For instance, if a link leads to your widget ordering page, the anchor text might read "Order widgets." Specifically avoid using "click here" as anchor text.

Make sure your site includes a search box. This is really important, because people are accustomed to having that function, and when they want to find something on your site, they need to be able to find it. If they can't find what they need, they may leave your site altogether.

Always make sure that your site design works well on every browser. Your coding might look great in Firefox, but it could be askew in Internet Explorer. You need to find out exactly how things look in all browsers and then code in a way that leaves your site looking the same on every popular browser.

When you decide on a domain name to choose try your best to choose one that is going to draw people's attention. You don't want to pick a domain name this is going to deter people from coming to your site, names are everything and what draw people in, so take this into consideration when thinking of a name.

Think of cellphone users when designing your site. More people than ever before are using their mobile phone to surf the internet. If they cannot access your site or if it can't be viewed well on their phone, they will likely stay away from your site. That can cost you a lot of business.

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 wrap it up, you were not sure of the important role that web design plays in a company's success, but now you have quite a good feel for it. Ideally, this article will be more than enough to enable you to pass this information on and help other people with the same questions.
 
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