Saturday, February 16, 2013

Learn Web Design Quickly And Easily

By Winton Thomas


As more and more of our lives take place online, any business that wants to succeed needs to make sure it has an effective Internet presence. However, if your website does not work properly, your business will suffer. Learn how to design a great website with the following tips and techniques.

When it comes time to choosing a host for your website, make certain you know exactly what they will be providing you and at what cost. Things like disk space and bandwidth are crucial to the proper functioning of your site so make sure beforehand that your host is providing you with everything that you will need and at a price you can handle.

Keep your front page as simple as possible. People shopping around will immediately decide whether they will use your site or not, simply by how your front page looks. Be descriptive about what your business does, and your unique offerings, but keep everything else to a minimum to avoid distraction.

Organize your links and avoid putting too many links in one area of your site. Doing this can confuse visitors and make them leave your site. If you do have many low- to mid-importance links, emulate the "blogrolls" seen in many blogs and tuck them away in a column on the right side of the page.

No matter who your target audience is or what your site is intended for, you should always aim to keep loading time to ten seconds or less. A well-designed, efficient site should pop up in visitors' browsers in a matter of moments. The majority of online users demand instant gratification, and it is in your best interest to provide it.

Use custom error pages to make your site more informative. For instance, if you want people to report dead links on your site, either put a server-side script on your 404 page or have a form or email address that visitors can use to report the error. You should have custom pages for 403, 404, and 500 errors, at the very least.

Keep your page sizes to a minimum. Not all internet users have fast connection speeds, and the longer your site takes to load, the less interest they will have. You do not want your page viewers to be stuck waiting for every page to download, or they may end up abandoning your site.

When designing your site, try to come up with three or four keywords that you expect users to input into search engines as they try to find your page. These keywords should then be repeated frequently throughout the title, page body and description meta tag. This will make it easier for users to locate your site on the web.

Make sure to test early and to test quite often. It's very important that you carry out your site's user interaction and usability tests as early as you can in the design phase of your website. Make sure to keep improving and testing it as your website continues to grow.

As you have seen, web design does not have to be a difficult task. Once you know more about the basic principles involved, you should be able to construct a website that will appeal to your visitors and help them find what they need.




About the Author:



No comments: