For business owners who want to operate online, hiring a web designer can be a huge expense. If you are considering building your first website, you can save money by doing it yourself. That said, it has to be done right. The expert advice below will guide you.
A good website should be compatible with multiple browsers, so you should test your website in various browsers to ensure that any visitor can view it correctly. What works in Internet Explorer may not necessarily show up correctly in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Test every page in each browser before you let your site go live.
Always give viewers the option to cancel a current action. Whether filling out forms, signing up for email notices or even needing browsing options, users will find this useful. By not letting visitors cancel something that they don’t want to finish, you’re pretty much forcing them into doing something. This can harm your return visits or purchases.
You want to make your site content compelling and intriguing. Yes, your design should be nice, but the content will bring visitors back. If visitors are able to find what they need, they will come back again at some point.
Which file formats you use for graphics is key to user satisfaction. Generally, JPEGs and GIFs are the best graphics. Though better for the actual creation of web graphics, PNG and CMP files use up a lot of disk space. To ensure your site is user friendly, these types of graphics should be converted to file types of manageable size.
Having a website counter at the bottom of your page is really an unattractive feature. It is not something visitors really want to see. Get rid of it and use other ways to see how many people have visited your site.
It does not matter how much money you have invested into the website, being a site host is not a great idea. Even if you create the basic design yourself, do not fall into the trap of spending the inordinate amounts of time necessary to host it yourself.
Always proofread for content error. Your goal is for people to be able to read it easily and quickly. Errors make you look unprofessional and unreliable.
Ask friends and colleagues about HTML, Photoshop or Dreamweaver. You need to be sure that the information you have is ingrained and you don’t need to find yourself making a site when you suddenly get confused or lost.
Have a visible tagline on every page and sub-domain. This slogan should be prominently displayed near the top of the page and be in bold text, so that visitors can’t miss it. A good tagline should inform your visitors about the goals of your website and encourage them to read the content.
Do your best to not come across as a low rent spammer strictly focusing on playing the numbers game by forcing your visitor into something they don’t want. Do not attempt to force them to do an offer or a survey before continuing on with your site. By requiring visitors to do something before moving on, you will likely cause them to run far away and never return.
You will design better websites if you keep learning about web design. Once you master any facet of website design, move on to another. While this might take longer initially, the knowledge you gain will have multiple benefits in the future.
Don’t purchase books showing you how to build your own website. It is not necessarily a bad investment. There are many books and magazines that are accurate and full of useful information. However, all this information can be found free. Expensive books don’t hold more information than ones that are free.
When creating multiple pages in a subcategory of your website, the copy/paste feature of your PC is your best friend! Copy the bulk of the code and then tweak it to change the content, heading and navigation menu. You will be able to use this master copy over and over again.
Be sure to maintain your site regularly and do away with any negative comments or spam that may appear. Blog owners or forum moderators should focus on this especially. Paying attention to your website is key in order to remove unwanted items from your site so it doesn’t get too cluttered.
Most websites do well with a neutral background color. Textured backgrounds can easily overwhelm the visitor, and, when used improperly, can really make your design look amateurish. Use a neutral color such as white. Neutral colors are easier to read.
Learning anything is never an easy journey, and that holds true for web design. In fact, you’ll probably mess up on a few different aspects of web page design. But, you should use what you’ve learned here and you will build an effective site.