Tips To Help You With Web Design
Tips To Help You With Web Design
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.
Don't neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user's local cache thereafter.
Ensure your website can pass the NoScript test. The NoScript extension can be downloaded for Mozilla Firefox; doing so will allow you to be sure your site can be read. Some content, such as ordering systems for products, can't work without scripts, but if your site is simply blank with scripts turned off, that's bad news.
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.
Use images wisely. Bitmap images do not tend to fare well for internet use, and some GIFs do not work well with lots of color. Image size is important as well, as larger images may make your viewers have to wait for them to download. Choose smaller images, and use them sparingly to make your site more manageable.
To help you design a website that is free of clutter, do not include any scrolling text on your site. Websites that have things constantly moving back and forth on the screen is really distracting to the visitor. Not only is this distracting and annoying, it screams unprofessional and will cause your visitors to leave quickly.
White is an effective and visually attractive background color for a website. White backgrounds give your site a professional look, as well as make the content easy to read. Complex backgrounds distract your readers and visitors, and might slant your page towards an unprofessional image. It is best to stick with a simple background when you are designing your website.
To design a more attractive site, include useful meta tags per each page. Quality and relevant meta tags will provide search engines with information regarding your site. If you do not have good meta tags that describe your site well, you are not going to attract many visitors to your site.
Take the time to actually use your site as you are building it. Running usability and user interaction tests early in the game can really save you frustration in the long run. Make sure to keep improving and testing it as your website continues to grow.
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.