Knowing How To Tap Into Your Web Design Potential

No matter what sort of website you have, it is important to make sure that it follows the principles of good web design. A poorly designed website will drive away visitors and frustrate those few who persevere. The following article can help you design a high quality website and attract more traffic. 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. Try to minimize your image usage. Generally, simpler designs are more effective for the user. So keep your site simple, but also neat. Avoid cluttering pages with large, bulky images that have long loading times. Try being creative with the layout and using your "eye."For example, use eye-catching focal points to get a viewer to visit something specific. When designing a website with a lot of text, choose your fonts wisely. While serif text will work well for a title or headline, the body of the text should be in a serif font, which is easier to read on a computer screen. Try to use common computer fonts such as Times New Roman and Ariel. Make sure your text and background has the proper contrast. There's evidence showing that white text on a black background is easiest for most people to read, but other colors are fine so long as they're readable. Also keep in mind that people with visual impairments may not be able to read your site if the contrast is poor. Check to see if your site complies with various contrast standards using the tool at http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html . When you are designing a page with links, make sure that the link has text content. Links that show content are clearly visible to the visitor so they know what they are clinking on. If there are links on your page without text content, they could accidentally click the link through a keyboard shortcut. Do some keyword research. While your main focus should always be on providing your customer with relevant and current information, you first need to work on gaining a customer base. Understanding what keywords will bring people to your site from a search engine is a needed step to becoming a successful site. 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. A good resource where you can learn some insightful knowledge is a book store. You can go to a bookstore and read books that have information on html, c+, photoshop, and dreamweaver as these are some of the key things you need to learn when it comes to being a well- knowledgable web designer. Do not depend on free web hosting if you are creating a commercial site. You are much better off spending money on basic web hosting, which will prevent your site from being clogged by advertisements that you cannot control. Furthermore, free web hosting might not provide you with enough bandwidth to support the kind of traffic your site may see. When starting your own website, use a shared server or grid hosting package as opposed to the much more expensive dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting can destroy your budget before you even get started, so go with the less expensive shared hosting when you begin so that your website starts out on the right foot. Avoid using too many graphics. While graphics are important to give your website a professional, cohesive and well-designed look, using too many of them can create clutter. You should never use graphics simply to decorate your site; they are used to improve your site. Having the appropriate number of graphics that do not create clutter improves the usability of your website, too. Create webpages that are "scannable". Reading online is different than reading a newspaper or a book. By default, site visitors scan webpages, looking for anything that stands out. Make sure your pages have lists, bolded words, titles, and short blocks of text. That way, your site will "feel better" to site visitors, enticing them to stay on your site. Stay with a layout that is basic and not all that confusing so that you don't confuse yourself. Do this so that you get the basics down first then try your best to upgrade to an intermediate site and from there progress to a site that is more advanced in the end. If you're working on web design use the right graphics for the job. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don't work well, PNGs work fine. For screenshots, text buttons, and other non-photographic images, use PNG if the image has more than 256 colors, and GIF if not. For photos, you can use JPEG images. As you have seen, the principles of good web design are not terribly mysterious or difficult to implement. However, too many websites still ignore these basic techniques. Do not let your site fall into this category. Put these techniques into practice to design a website that you can be proud of.