Solid Advice For The College Web Designer

By Opal Billing


Trying to design a website can be extremely intimidating! How do you go about devising an eye-catching design? And then, you have to decide where to start coding. The advice in this article will allow you to put together a website that looks both professional and publicizes your content. It is always good to add a favicon to your website. The favicon is a 16x16 image file in the .Ico format. This image is the one you see next to the URL bar, next to the title of the page on an opened tab and is also visible on your bookmarks tab if you choose to bookmark a page. The favicon will help users quickly recognize your page in their browser without reading any text or directly viewing the page.

Don't use splash pages for your site unless required by law, and especially don't use a Flash intro. Most people just want to get to your content as quickly as possible, and don't care to look at useless splash pages. If you have some amusing content that you absolutely want visitors to see, integrate it into the homepage instead.

Never allow dated or irrelevant content to remain on your website. If you have a page that is promoting some type of special event that already went on six months ago, then you have lost readers. Users want to spend their time on sites that are cared for, and leaving up old information shows a lack of attention to the site. Make sure you regularly schedule time to add new content, and to remove old.

Use a sensible background for your site. There are sites out there that use animated GIF images for their backgrounds. This might be OK for a personal site, but it can also be a serious distraction that makes it hard for readers to focus on the text. Choose backgrounds that coordinate with your site, rather than clashing with it, and your message will be much more clear to your visitors.

Before you publish any web page, check it carefully for broken links. Nothing is more frustrating to a visitor than clicking on a link and being taken to an error page. You can check your links manually, or there are programs that will scan your site for you and report any broken links. 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.

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.

Do not use blinking, scrolling text or other animations. Also, steer clear of sounds or music that plays automatically. All of these things are distracting to users and provide nothing of value. In addition, connection speeds vary from one site visitor to the next, and everyone does not have the same speed. Those users with slower connections will resent the slow-loading elements of your site.

Reading this article is a great start, so consider printing it out and going over it a few times to absorb it's content. By continuing your education, and learning new techniques, you can outpace your rivals, and distinguish yourself.




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