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Tuesday 8 January 2013

Use These Web Design Tips To Maximize Your Site's Look


There's more that goes into creating a website than you may be aware of. From the initial planning of the site to ensuring that even the smallest border around a block of text is aligned correctly, web design can seem daunting if you dive in unprepared. Allow these tips to help you become better prepared to face the challenge. A good tip for all web designers is to choose whatever development platform you use, extremely carefully. All development platforms are not created equal and there are some, such as WYSIWYG, that are not nearly as reliable as other platforms. Make sure you do your research before deciding what to use. To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages. To help keep your site visitors happy, do not underline words. Underline words on the internet signifies that the word is a clickable link. If you have too many words on your pages that are underlined with being clickable links, then your visitors will be frustrated after continuously trying to click on them. Avoid useless scripts. Scripts like counters and date/time scripts don't really serve any purpose, and since they are all JavaScript, can add a few kilobytes to the page's file size. Getting rid of these elements also frees up space on the homepage. Replace those useless scripts with useful content that keeps users coming back. To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k. When checking the references that have been provided by a web design company it is important to discuss deadlines. You will want to hire a company that is able to meet their deadlines so that you can get your webpage set up and running in a timely manner. You do not want to work with a company that cannot meet their deadlines. Always mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. These files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer if the user does not have it. To help you design a website that is free of clutter, do not include any scrolling text on your site. Websites that have things constantly moving back and forth on the screen is really distracting to the visitor. Not only is this distracting and annoying, it screams unprofessional and will cause your visitors to leave quickly. Web designers who are trying to choose a web hosting service should be wary of any service that claims you have unlimited bandwidth. There is not such thing as unlimited bandwidth and they could just be trying to scam you into signing with them. Make sure you read all the fine print! When new technology is released, it is your job to learn everything you can if you want to be the best web designer you can be. New technology could make your job easier or it could make your work stand out from the other web designers that are available. You need to take the time to give yourself all of the resources you can to make the most money possible. Make sure you have a good idea about what types of pages you want to add to your website. Site design is only easy if you plan ahead thoroughly. If you need a contact page, a sales page, various landing pages, etc, make sure you add them all early on. You can always edit as needed as the site starts to take shape. To help you design a nice looking website, purchase one of the many web design programs that are on the market today. Professional web design programs are simple to use and will have you creating beautiful looking websites really fast. If your website does not look good, then you will not have many visitors on your site. You need to get feedback from previous clients when you are a web designer. You need to learn where they think that you can improve and take their advice to heart. This is a great way for you to be able to improve on your skills and ultimately become a better web designer. Make sure you place ALT image tags during your web design. These tags are very helpful for those web surfers who view the web with images turned off, as well as to those web surfers who are visually impaired. The ALT tags can be read out loud by text-to-speech software. The general idea here is to get the gist of web design, not to become a pro overnight. Once you start to learn about a few different tactics, you will understand the concepts behind web design and will be able to translate your knowledge into tangible design features. Check back with these tips if you've had any difficulties.

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