Saturday, February 16, 2013

Design Advice For Your Next Web Site

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By Jeramy Dejardin


No matter what sort of website you have, it is important to make sure that it follows the principles of good web design. A poorly designed website will drive away visitors and frustrate those few who persevere. The following article can help you design a high quality website and attract more traffic.

Make sure your website is easily scanned. Various tests on usability demonstrate that most online readers do not actually read all the content; instead, they scan it for something that interests them. Using text that is emphasized to break it into sections that are easily scanned ensures your readers are more likely to return. Also, make sure to keep the most important information at the top. All of this ensures a more satisfying experience for your visitors because they can quickly find what they need.

You need to realize that building a website is going to take longer than you originally expect it will. Let's say that you believe you can get a site done in three weeks. Well, by the time you design it, load all your pages, test, make your tweaks, and ultimately finalize, you could be looking at months.

Use your creativity when you are designing a website. While you could simply copy the format of other successful website, you would be much better off if you found ways to improve upon them. Take the time and really find new ways to enhance the website to make it as good as it can be.

Make sure your website's call to action (CTA) is highlighted in your web design. If the visitor can not easily find what you really want them to do next, then you will be hard pressed to get them to move forward in your action cycle. Call out your CTA using icons, white space, a font size increase, bolding or some other format change that works with your design.

A great tip for web designers who are in the conceptualization stages of their website is simply to brainstorm. This simple, yet underutilized method is a great way to get your ideas down on paper so that you can better visualize what you would like the final product to be.

Creating a site map is a very important part of the web design process. A site map is an effective way to inform visitors of the various kinds of content that your website has to offer, and is a great tool for navigating your website. Search engine crawlers will also utilize your site map for similar reasons, and therefore, including a site map will help boost your search rankings. Make sure your website has a site map, and that it is through.

Good web design includes some white space in your overall layout. The most important thing on your site is the quality content and the effective use of white space on your page will direct the users' eye to your content. Avoid cluttering your page with useless information just to fill up every space.

A good tip for all web designers is to choose whatever development platform you use, extremely carefully. All development platforms are not created equal and there are some, such as WYSIWYG, that are not nearly as reliable as other platforms. Make sure you do your research before deciding what to use.

When you are working toward building a successful site, be sure to include a page that is full of real customer testimonials. You may even want to inquire as to whether some of your customers would be willing to submit photos of themselves that you can link to their review to make it more personable.

When establishing yourself as a web designer you need to have a good list of references. After you have done work for someone you need to take the time to ask them about their experience and if you have their permission to use them as a reference for future clients. Most people will not mind if you have done good work for them.

If you have received awards or certifications for different things, include a page or an area of your "About Us" page to show off those accomplishments. It is a great way to boost the visitor's faith in your credibility. Make sure that you are completely hones about these things, as it can easily be checked and can blow up in your face if you fabricate it.

To help you design a nice looking website, purchase one of the many web design programs that are on the market today. Professional web design programs are simple to use and will have you creating beautiful looking websites really fast. If your website does not look good, then you will not have many visitors on your site.

If you're designing a website, make sure the code you write has a valid HTML+CSS. Although most browsers can make sense of code that isn't valid, it could be rendered correctly or incorrectly. Valid code will render the same way most of the time in modern browsers. You can check the validity of your HTML code with an HTML validator.

Become a cascading style sheet (CSS) expert. HTML is one thing, but the real design (and consistency in design) happens in CSS. These style sheets act as a formatting reference guide to your site to help each page maintain a consistent look and feel. This also makes it very easy for universally change things on your site. If you want to change your font color to red on every page, all you need to do is alter one line of code!

Try having a clear and consistent layout in the design of your sites. Clean layouts that make use of a lot of white space tend to enhance the site's readability and overall look. The layout must be focused on the content. Try using fonts that are on every computer in order to avoid having your site appear incorrectly.

As you have seen, the principles of good web design are not terribly mysterious or difficult to implement. However, too many websites still ignore these basic techniques. Do not let your site fall into this category. Put these techniques into practice to design a website that you can be proud of.




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