Making a website can be both scary and exciting! It’s hard to know who to turn to for advice, how much money to spend and where to begin. The following tips should give you enough information to draw up a basic plan and start building a quality website.
You should always be on the lookout for new information from various forums that can help you learn how to start out, or gain more knowledge with website development. There are countless websites that you can find with a quick search through Google that can help you.
Color Scheme
Choose your color scheme wisely. The text on your web pages, in particular, needs to be clear and easy to read on the colors you choose for your backgrounds. Dark text colors on light backgrounds are usually easier to read compared to the other way around. If you aren’t sure if your color scheme works well, show it off to a friend for some feedback.
Make it possible for users to cancel action if they want to do so. For example, allow users to cancel registration for newsletters or easily back out of a search. When you do not allow visitors to cancel something they do not wish to complete, you are forcing them into something, which can prove detrimental to fostering return visits and/or purchases.
Keep your topics separated. If you have many topics on your site, try keeping them on separate pages. This will help to alleviate confusion and help keep your site organized. It will also make it easier for web crawlers to better navigate and rank your site.
You can build yourself a fine website using only free software. It is not necessary to spend a large amount of money on web designing software with the number of quality, free programs available. You just need to do a little Internet searching in order to find some free tools that will work best for you.
Search Engines
Leave out the frames if you want the website you create to be optimized for the major search engines. While they improve your site’s looks, any information contained in a frame is not indexed by search engines. If search engines are unable to see some of the key information presented by your site, your ranking is bound to suffer. Your traffic suffers if you fail to do this.
Remember to use ALT tags on any images you use in your website. These tags are very important for the handicapped segment of your target audience. If the images are links, the tags let you describe the link as well. It may also benefit your search engine rankings.
Optimize your website to handle computers that may be running older versions of programs like Internet Explorer 7 and 8. Many people are still using the older versions of Internet Explorer. They don’t render pages that have to do with regular standards on the web so you have to figure out a work around. Specifically, read about the “box model bug” that plagued IE for years.
Use conditional loading and independent CSS pages when creating your site. These two things make maintenance and testing simpler. Every website requires maintenance and making it simple will save you time in the long run.
The more work you put into learning website design, the easier it will get. So, try out your new skills and create a simple page using C+ and HTML. This will show you whether or not you have the basics down pat. You have to begin practicing at some point, so it’s best to begin now rather than waiting until later.
It is no longer on trend to use a visitor counter on your website. While you might think that it’s adding something to your site, it’s really something that your visitors don’t want to see. Get rid of visitor counters and encourage social media interaction instead.
Talk with your friends to discover if you’ve missed anything when you learned certain things, such as Photoshop, HTML, or Dreamweaver. Make sure you understood everything you learned so that you do not find yourself committing mistakes while designing your website.
Open Source Software
You should understand that it shouldn’t be costly to design your site. Though there are very good tools out there for making great websites, there are also ones that do the job for considerably less financial input on your part. For example, open source software that is free can assist you in accomplishing tasks that are exactly the same as paid software. Utilizing open source software can help you save a significant amount of money.
You don’t have to do everything yourself. In order to be successful at web page design, you need to know about content creation, graphic design, web programming, user interface design and search engine optimization. If you need help, don’t be shy about asking for it. You can always resort to hiring a website design company to finish any tasks you’re unable to do on your own. You can even ask them for advice as they do it so you can take it over and do it yourself next time.
Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, you are ready to dive in to the creation of your site. Draft up a budget, seek out advisers and begin sketching out your site. It is not necessary to spend a fortune creating a website. It just takes time, a little creativity and a willingness to learn. Good luck.