If yours is a startup, online business, you may not be able to afford the expense of hiring a web designer. If you’re a newcomer to the online business world, you can save a lot of money by designing your own website. Do not take shortcuts though. By using this advice, you can put together a professional website on your own.
If you’re creating a website, you must look at it in more than one browser. What you’re seeing on your end may not be what others are seeing on theirs. Make sure to research the browsers available. In addition, ask friends and family to check out the site, too. You never know if another operating system makes a difference.
Your site should be able to pass a NoScript test. See if the website is readable. There will be content that needs scripting like order systems. However, if the site is blank when the scripts are off, you have a problem.
Your website’s load times are effected by which file types you use for images. Generally, JPEGs and GIFs are the best graphics. PNG and BMP files offer advantages for web graphics, but the file sizes are too much for internet load times. By converting your graphics, you can help speed up load times.
Get in the habit of testing early and often. You need to use your website as a reader would in usability tests early in the design process. Also, testing allows you to make crucial changes to ensure the site is as good as it can be.
Visitors enjoy knowing more about the webmasters of their favorite sites. Most websites don’t have very interesting copy in this area. Make yours exciting! Try giving people a tiny peek into your personal background. Try showing how you got into web page design, who inspired you, and what you hope to accomplish with your business.
Website counters are pretty unattractive, so stay away from them. Visitors really don’t care how many other people have visited your site. Get rid of it and use other tools to track your visitors.
You shouldn’t host your site on your own server, even if you’re using your own money to set up a dedicated server and want to invest a large amount of money in your site. You should design it yourself (or at least as much as possible), but allowing someone else to host your site frees you up and allows you to focus on other things besides the site’s safety and security.
One great website creating program is Adobe Dreamweaver. This intuitive program is easy for anyone to use. You can add features and use their various layouts and templates.
Build a microsite at first, as this will help you get an overall impression of your current strengths and weaknesses as a web designer. Try starting with a couple basic pages that just have text in order to see how you do.
PhotoShop is a popular application and web designers must learn it. Dreamweaver is less well known, but is another program you should look into.
How effective is your site’s design? Try a task-based usability test. These tasks help to find the information that is in your site. If your website is well designed, the user should have no difficulty completing the task. Should the converse be true, you will gain insight from the task to help you find areas of improvement for your website.
If you use FileZilla, be certain that your username, proper port and domain are all programmed into its quick menu settings. This will allow you to quickly choose your settings from the menu when you log into your server. This can save a ton of time.
Web Host
If you’re aiming to host videos within your website, you should check to see if your web host will allow it. A lot of services cannot spare the bandwidth or storage space for videos. All of the FLV files occupy a huge amount of server space, so there is no point setting up a website to accept them if your web host can’t make the space.
Don’t expect the ride from beginner to website development pro to be a cake walk. You are bound to make some errors along the way. However, when you keep and practice what you read in this article, then you will eventually find success.