Is web design a skill you want to cultivate? Is not knowing where to start holding you back? If you want to improve your web design skills, this article is chock full of beginner-friendly tips.
A business website should always be one that is easy to navigate. Links need to be prominent and simple to find. You can also improve your website’s navigation by using simple menus. To help visitors find their way back, be sure to have a visible link to the main page on all your pages.
If you want to have videos on your website, you should first confirm with your web host that they will allow this. It is not uncommon for hosts to forbid users to host video content. The FLV files are big and take up a lot of space on servers, so check to make sure it is allowed before wasting your efforts.
Try and write a decent “About Us” page. Some websites “About Us” pages are very dull and boring. Try to give it a bit of personality. Try giving people a tiny peek into your personal background. Try showing how you got into web design, who inspired you, and what you hope to accomplish with your business.
This is a simple but often overlooked step in web design. Be sure that you look over every word on your site to ensure that there are no typos on your site. You will immediately come across as an amateur if your content is poor or presented in an inferior way. If your site looks unprofessional, you will lose visitors.
Invest in some books on the topic of 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.
Choose your color scheme wisely. The text needs to show against the background easily so your site is easily recognizable as yours. Dark text colors on lighter backgrounds tend to be easier on the eyes than light colors on dark backgrounds. If you need help determining weak points of your website, show your current version to a friend for feedback.
Test your site on multiple browsers, platforms (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc.) and devices (Mac, PC, tablets, cell phones, etc.) A given web browser will interpret a website differently than another one will, and sometimes the differences are quite drastic. It is easy to discover the most popular browsers. Check your site on every browser, and include the popular browsers on cellphones too.
Have someone test your website out for functionality every step along the way. Whenever you add a brand-new feature, have someone test and judge it while being impartial. A slow-loading video may not bother you, but someone else may think otherwise. Use the wisdom of others who are outside your immediate circle to get an opinion.
You may notice interesting web design techniques being used by other web designers, but you want to innovate, not copy. Come up with your very own features and style, possibly enhancing ideas you lift from other websites that impress you. If you do this, you will be maximizing all of your efforts in your website design.
When adding bulky multimedia like videos to your site, consider the different connections with which people might be accessing it. While you can be tempted to have videos at 5,000 kilobytes per second, that may be too fast for a lot of people’s connections to handle. This can mean a very slow loading time for the video, which will cause it to buffer frequently.
You should be consistent when using fonts and color schemes in your website. Being consistent in the design of your website lets visitors know they are still on your site. Employing consistent graphics and fonts throughout your site can prevent this problem. Use the same fonts, colors, and styles in your company literature and brochures to maximize cohesiveness.
Think like an artist when designing your website. This means that you should be prepared to receive inspiration as it occurs. If you’re eating some sushi and think of something cool to put on your website, grab your iPad and record the idea. If you don’t have a way to write it down, you can always call your phone and leave a text or answering machine message with details.
Pay close attention to the backgrounds of your site design. Animated GIF backgrounds and complicated patterns on your website can be very distracting to viewers trying to absorb your content. Choose backgrounds that coordinate with your site, rather than clashing with it, and your message will be much more clear to your visitors.
Your preferred domain name may already be in use; look at auction sites that sell domain names to see if you can still purchase it. These sites are clearinghouses for outstanding domain names that are now unused or have been sold which you can now pick up for comparatively little money.
White space is actually essential in order to perfect website design. You don’t want to clutter everything together and make it seem unorganized. It improves readability, gives your content the focus of the page and allows the mind of your reader to be relaxed and absorb what you’re trying to get across.
Allow visitors to search your site from every page. This ensures that all parts of your carefully designed site are always accessible to the people that need them. These searches are easy to add — and worth the time.
FileZilla is a great piece of software to help you upload your website, but ensure you fill out all of the settings in the quick menu. FileZilla will save your settings and let you connect right away thanks to your personalized settings. Ultimately, this will save you loads of time.
Hopefully now you feel a lot more confident about tackling web design. Use what you’ve learned in the article above, to build a killer website.
