Keep your website clean, attractive and efficient to help increase traffic. If this isn't the case, working on it will not work out for you. It all returns to web design. Visitors want to look at seamlessly, functional websites that are attractive. Use these tips to create a great website. If you are creating a website, make sure you view your site in different browsers. What you see on your screen may be different from what others see. Make sure that your site is compatible with all popular browsers. Have a friend or colleague pull up your site in an alternate operating system to ensure their view is comparable to your own. Test your website before it goes live. There's nothing worse then launching your new website and having to take it down right away due to bugs or other issues. Get a group of people together who are using different web browsers and computer platforms, and ask them to use a beta version of your website, writing down any issues they come across. When you are creating graphics or photos for your website, be sure to keep the file size small. If your graphics are too large, your page will load slowly and your visitors will leave. You can find many free or inexpensive graphics programs online that will optimize your images before you load them to your website. Make text easy to ready by using colors that contrast or backgrounds that are easy to read text on. When your text is harder to read because the background or text color creates eye strain or portions of text that are unreadable, site visitors are less likely to stick around. Keep your topics separated. Each topic should be put on separate pages. This will eliminate visitor confusion and make it easier for search engines to gain a clear and broad view of the site and help you build traffic. Make sure your site navigation is simple, well-maintained, and transparent. Navigation links are very important for any site and controls how much time a visitor spends on your site. The structure of navigation should be consistent, clean and user friendly to offer the best experience. Every website designer needs a good platform to test their work out on, and XAMPP is probably the best out there. XAMPP will allow you to run your test sites with PHP and mySQL, so you will always be able to spot anything that needs to be changed. XAMPP is a relatively light download and it's also easy to figure out. Always utilize media and content that is both relative to your site's goal, but also interesting to the potential consumers who will be viewing your site. A site that has relative info, but that is not interesting, won't captivate its audience. A website that uses fun, but non-relative information, will captivate the wrong audience. Both methods equal profits that you are losing. Try to begin your site with minimal content. This helps build a niche and gets them focused on whatever message you are delivering instead of spending wasted time jumping from page to page looking for what interests them. Many newbies place too much information on their home page. Practice as much as you can. Try out everything you learn with regard to web design so that you truly understand how it works. You want to do this because you want to make sure all of the knowledge that you're learning is easy for you to apply. You don't want to make any mistakes! When you do progress through your stages of web design and have a site that is up and running you want to make sure that it isn't cluttered with ads. People don't mind ads but they hate it when there are a lot that make it difficult to navigate through your site, and you don't want people mad. There are undoubtedly a number of existing site styles and designs that appeal to you, but it's essential to harness your own unique creativity. Create designs on your own, and improve on the ones you've witnessed on other websites. Doing this will boost your website quality. Make sure to include a search function. A search form is critical for a site because it is user-friendly and functional, allowing a visitor to easily find information they want without leaving your site. These searches are easy to add -- and worth the time. Constantly monitor your site so you can quickly remove negative content posted by others. This is a necessity for blog and forum owners who allow people to comment on their site. A website designer is only good if they clean up the site. You want to ensure all content is proofread and that it doesn't look rushed. Users should be able to go through it with no problems. Errors make your site look careless and unprofessional and this, in turn, will not encourage a positive reputation for your site. If you're having any doubts about your ability to create a great site, you can always scale back the vision. A site doesn't need a forum and a chat room and a videos page and a miscellaneous section. You can make do just fine with only a few options. It's great to dream big, but you need to be a realist. Make sure your site includes a search box. This is really important, because people are accustomed to having that function, and when they want to find something on your site, they need to be able to find it. If they can't find what they need, they may leave your site altogether. Eliminate Flash from your site and look for an alternative. Flash can look exciting and high-tech, but on some machines it will lag and cause a site visitor's computer to lag. Also, many computers, especially tablet computers like the iPad, do not even have Flash capabilities. Not being able to see elements of your site might cause visitors to leave and never return. To summarize, you knew it would be a good idea to refresh yourself on a few web design tips or to start off by getting a good baseline knowledge on the subject. There is quite a bit of information available and ideally you were able to find this article both interesting and useful for your website. |