Designing Your Own Website? Read This First!

TIP! The graphics you use are important. Keep in mind how big a bitmap image is, but using PNG images work better.

You might already know how a website works, but do you actually know how to design one? It takes some skill to add design features using HTML code. Learning all you can before you begin is the wisest thing you can do. For some help, take a look at this piece.

TIP! Fixed-position navigation is useful to visitors. The navigation panel is essentially stuck in one place as the user scrolls down to view more content.

If you’re creating a website, make sure you look at it in different browsers. What you see on your side may not always be what the others see on theirs. Make changes to your site to make it look good on all popular browsers. In addition, let someone who uses an operating system that differs from yours check the site for compatibility.

TIP! One of the biggest mistakes a newbie designer makes is not verifying how a site looks in several different browsers. What you’re seeing on your end may not be what others are seeing on theirs.

The speed at which your web page loads is an important design factor. If someone visiting your site has to wait a while in order for a page to load, it’s likely they will click off your site and leave. They probably won’t return.

TIP! Choose your color scheme wisely. You should be striving to achieve easily readable and visible text set against your chosen background shade.

It does not matter how you have designed your website; you have to make sure that every file has a small file size. Your file sizes have a lot to do with the speed of your site loading. You should strive to make sure that your website loads as fast as it possibly can. Remember that there are still lots of people who do not have high speed Internet. Perform tests on your website to make sure that it loads fast, even when a dial-up connection is used.

TIP! If you want your website to cater to the needs of visitors, it must be user-friendly and simple to navigate. Your links need to be prominently placed, easy to understand and functional.

When you are choosing your background color, white is an effective choice. White backgrounds make copy much more easily readable and give your site a more mature look. Gaudy backgrounds, by contrast, often blend in with the content, and make it appear to be hastily put together. When choosing a background for your website, a simple background is better.

Meta Tags

TIP! Minimize the use of JavaScript. It does provide more ways for you to build a responsive and transparent site, but it can be problematic for some visitors.

Meta tags used on each page of your site, can increase visitors to your site. This is an important design consideration. High-quality meta tags will help search engines determine the topic of your website. Non descriptive or inaccurate meta tags will result in low visibility for your website.

TIP! Build a feedback-gathering mechanism into a website to gather visitors’ opinions. That will allow you to fix any problems that you may not otherwise notice.

Do not place adds that pop up on your site. PPC ads are often necessary, but pop-up ads just tick visitors off. Instead of clicking your ads they will just leave your site. You don’t need pop-ups; just keep the ads simple.

TIP! Use ALT tags for your images when designing your site. These tags provide several very important functions in that they describe images for people who browse the Internet with graphics disabled, and provide descriptions for people who are visually impaired and utilize tools that translate images to voice.

Website counters near the bottom of the page are pretty unattractive. You might care about how much traffic your site is getting, but visitors to your site don’t. Find another way to track your traffic.

TIP! When you are designing a page with links, make sure that the link has text content. These types of links let the user know exactly what they are clicking.

Sign up for web design newsletters. These newsletters can help you stay motivated, remind you of basic website creation principles and give you a foundation to build on if you get stuck or forget what you’re trying to achieve. Newsletters can help both beginners and veterans learn more.

TIP! Be sure to make sure that your website works on the different browsers that are out there. Each browser program handles sites in a different way, and these variations can alter the user’s interface significantly.

Keep your content brief, especially if you are new to website development. A huge amount of content may be hard for you to organize and may confuse and annoy those who come to your site.

TIP! Always check your website for broken hyperlinks. The right time to make this check is well before you upload a page and take it live.

When utilizing FileZilla for your file server, you should ensure you’re programming the settings for the quick menu with your domain, username, and the right port. That way, the next time you log back into your server, you just need to go to the menu and choose personalized settings. Ultimately, this will save you loads of time.

TIP! Website counters were popular in the 90s but are rather unattractive now. It may be a neat tool in your mind, but it is unattractive and unfortunately shows visitors how many people actually have come to the page.

You will design a better site if you keep learning every step of the way. As soon as you figure one aspect of site design out, you should attempt to tackle another. This could slow down the process of site-building, but you’ll be rewarded with information that you need to create dozens of sites once you learn it.

TIP! One great website creating program is Adobe Dreamweaver. Even if you are a beginner, you can easily use this program.

Some people pay for their bandwidth, especially on mobile devices, so take that into consideration when placing video on your site. You might want to convert your videos at 5,000 kb/s, but that may be a lot faster than someone’s connection. Videos with extremely high speeds like this will load slowly and buffer frequently for visitors on slow connections.

TIP! Be sure that you don’t have a design for your website that is too similar to that of your competitors’ sites. Visit the competition and compare it to your site.

This article has shown you that it can be easy to design a website. It does take skill, though, so you will need the tips shared here. Keep these tips in mind as you set out to design your own professional looking website.