This is a great article for anyone who wants to break into web design, either for themselves or as a career. Here you will learn some great tips for getting started that will help you design a high quality web site. Regardless of your level of experience, this article has a lot to offer.
Using proper and high-quality meta tags on your website is crucial to proper web design and attracting more traffic. Properly used meta tags make it easier for search engines to classify your site correctly. If you use poorly constructed meta tags that don’t reflect your content accurately, you won’t get much traffic.
Free web hosting might sound like a bargain, but it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Avoid it for any of your business needs. Though you can’t beat the initial cost of free, free hosting includes ads and other features that can detract from your site. Not only will this go against your beliefs, but it will also drive your visitors mad.
White is generally a safe background color to use when designing a professional website. Content is generally more readable on white backgrounding, and this makes your page look both more professional and trustworthy. Complex backgrounds can make pages unreadable and give your site an amateurish look. With backgrounds the simpler, the better.
Talk with your friends to discover if you’ve missed anything when you learned certain things, such as Photoshop, HTML, or Dreamweaver. You want to make sure that all of the information that you learned was truly retained; the last thing you need is to be in the middle of making a site and become lost or confused.
A good place to find a domain name that suits the kind of site you want to create is to look through domain auctions. SEDO and similar domain auctions can be a big help to your website by letting you purchase already-established domain names. Getting a domain name this way might cost some money, but a powerful one is worth the expense.
If you are considering hosting videos on a website, be sure to check with the web host to make sure that it is allowed. Some hosts do not permit videos to be hosted on their servers. FLV files occupy a lot of room on servers, so make sure you’re allowed before you waste a lot of time.
A good website should be compatible with multiple browsers, so you should test your website in various browsers to ensure that any visitor can view it correctly. If something works in Chrome it might not work in Firefox, for example. Test every page in each browser before you let your site go live.
If you are looking to hire a professional web designer, make sure you choose someone that isn’t related to you. Hiring a good friend or a relative to design your site may not be the best idea. You may be hesitant to voice your dissatisfaction with someone’s work, or let them go, if you know the person well.
Though it’s tempting to go all out with design elements, remember that many who visit your site are actually looking for valuable information. Keep your site simple and easy to navigate, and only include positive, relevant content and information. Having a simpler page will decrease load time.
When the site is launched, the process of design isn’t finished. Do not simply abandon your site after you have launched it. It will not be necessary to update every day, but do realize that fresh content must be a priority. That is particularly the case if you host videos or deal with current events. Maintaining your site is different from making an occasional post on your blog. It’s going to take some hard work and attention to detail.
Start investing in books and resources that help you learn to be successful with your web design. Make sure that you start out with books that are around your web design level. You want to progress, but not skip any information along the way, so you can be great at designing websites.
Make sure that your designs aren’t that similar to other designs in your immediate niche. You can investigate this by simply looking around at the websites of competitors. You don’t want to be classed as “one of the pack”, the more unique you are, the more noticeable you will be. It will only serve to make you a diluted version of what someone else has already done.
Build websites with fonts that are easy-to-read, professional-looking, and widely available. Professional websites use professional fonts. Avoid silly, bubbly or hard to read fonts and especially avoid obscure fonts that may not be supported by all browsers. A font can be subset to the default font on your user’s computer if they don’t have it. Sometimes this looks worse, but often times it helps the reader who otherwise may not have been able to read your website clearly.
Make sure an international audience can understand your content. Many people from all over the world may view your site, so make sure things like dates, times, currencies and measurements can be understood by all. Keep your mind open and think globally, so you can gain a larger audience.
Allow “site searching” on all of your pages. The simple, speedy access this capability gives to visitors will put the information they’re looking for at their fingertips, and make the site highly user-friendly. The ease with which these can be used, and the benefit to your visitors, make any effort worthwhile, to put them in place.
One way to to ensure that your website will run smoothly is to validate each page. There are quite a few WYSIWYG editors that are guilty of putting a great deal of junk code on sites that they design. There are some quality validation programs that will not add junk code to your website design. It doesn’t have to cost anything; the W3C, or consortium for the World Wide Web, provides a free validation service.
We hope this article has been of help to you. Be sure to always watch for new sources of knowledge, as the more you learn the more you will perfect your web design skills.