How To Design Your Web Site Easily

By Macy Guilford


While it can be scary to embark on the road to creating a new website, the rewards can be worth it in the end. The tips you'll read here will make your journey a little easier, leading to an amazing end product.

Don't neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user's local cache thereafter.

Be sure to select the correct graphics when designing your website. Bitmap images require a lot of disk space and are unwieldy. For screenshots, text buttons, and other non-photographic images, use PNG if the image has more than 256 colors, and GIF if not. JPEG images are good for pictures.

Use ALT tags whenever possible. These helpful tags describe an image to a viewer, assisting the visually impaired, as well as those who prefer to browse without images. As an added bonus, some search engines include these tags in their rankings, so you may get a boost by using them.

For multimedia presentations, take advantage of the new HTML5 standard. Although HTML5 isn't quite as robust for animation and games as Flash, it has the advantage of working stably on mobile phone browsers, including those contained in Apple hardware. HTML5 is also quite a bit leaner than Flash, so load times will improve, as well.

Do not have pop-up windows on your site. Although you may think they are helpful, many people think they are annoying. If customers see these popups and get frustrated, they may not come back to your site.

Test your website in the most popular browsers and platforms to make sure that it displays correctly. Sometimes scripts that work in one browser may not produce the same results in another browser. So you may need take extra measures, like adding a function for browser detection, in order to ensure that your website will display properly under most conditions.

Give your visitors the ability to search your site so that they can more easily find what they are looking for. If someone cannot find what they are looking for right away, their next thought will be to look for a search field. Put this somewhere obvious and include a search button.

To help your website visitors easily navigate through your site, design it so that it becomes easy to find "stuff." When you have a simple site that makes it easy to locate information, you keep your visitors there much longer. If you make it difficult for them, then they will get frustrated and leave.

You now know what it takes to design a good website, as well as how to make a profit doing it. Web design is useful to know how to do because it can help you either save money on designing your personal website or make money designing other people's websites.




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