Monday, May 21, 2012

Top Tips To Boost Your Web Design

By Jeff Ben


Building a brand-new website can be fun or it can be a hassle, or even a mixture of the two. It can be hard to decide where or how to begin or who you should get advice from. The following tips should give you enough information to draw up a basic plan and start building a quality website.

When making many pages in a sub-category of your site, remember that copying and pasting can be your best friend. Copy the bulk of the code and then tweak it to change the content, heading and navigation menu. Doing this will save you a ton of time!

Include strong meta-tags on every page of your site, if you want to get more visitors to your site. Quality meta tags will help the search engines to recognize what your site is all about. Tags that incorrectly label your site can cause visitors searching for your site's niche to not find the site, reducing the number of hits.

Keep your links working and up-to-date. Good web design should always be easy to navigate, and free of error messages. Regularly check your links to ensure everything is working the way it should.

Use your friends or colleagues as a source for refreshing your information from the various design elements you use. It is important to ensure that you learn as much as possible about designing your site. Otherwise, you run the risk of making costly errors.

Give your website some time every day. Putting in a few minutes here and there is likely to be less effective than devoting larger amounts of time. Diligent work with your website will boost your own profits as well as your skill level.

Using white (unused) space effectively can actually improve your website, so don't think your website needs to be jam-packed with content. White space improves readability for your visitors, and they will be able to better read and absorb the information you are providing if your site is not cluttered.

Make sure that you thoroughly check the code on each webpage that you design. Easy-to-use WYSIWYG web editing programs tend to burden your pages with junk code that is extraneous or even harmful. When using those programs, it's important to take the extra step and validate your code through a validation service. The W3C's web site has an HTML validation widget that will validate your pages at no cost.

While making your website, remember that you don't need to use all the available space. Using every pixel available to you can make the website feel overwhelming or cluttered. However, by leaving some space between your site's content, you can provide your visitors with an experience that's more comfortable. You would be surprised how empty space can often be as valued as content.

You can use a What You See Is What You Get code editor (WYSIWYG), but using a text editor such as Notepad, gives you full flexibility when editing your code. Site features are designed within the platform, and then the generated code is pasted in. Even if you do use one of these editors, make sure to check your code in a text editor afterward to clean up erroneous or extraneous code.

If there is a logo placed on your site, that logo needs to link back to your homepage if someone clicks on it. At this point, people expect that a logo is clickable and will return anyone to your main page. Visitors will become frustrated if there is no easy way to return to the home page. Allowing them to click on the logo makes your website easier to navigate.

Web hosting is a package deal and you need to take the time to understand what the host is providing you for the price. The things that are important to know are bandwidth, CPU usage, disk space and any other areas that they highlight in their package. Be certain to know exactly what you will be getting.

When designing a site, use free software. Some people assume that spending hundreds of dollars on a software program is an absolute must. However, there are dozens of programs that offer comparable results for less money. You simply must be willing to find these helpful design resources.

Imitation might be the best form of flattery, but when it comes to web design it's important to develop your own ideas. Create original features that can't be found elsewhere and are better than those your competition provides. Using this technique will give you the ability to make amazing websites.

With the amount of time that your visitors likely spend on social networking sites, it makes sense to add links to your site to let them share your content on their favorite social sites. This can boost your traffic and help you get discovered easily.

Make sure your content is relevant to many different contexts and cultures. For example, currencies, measurements and ways of writing dates vary from country to country. Try to make these as universal as possible, or at least, make them easy for foreign visitors to read and understand. Since not all of your website visitors are from one country, ensure that your site is friendly to the viewer no matter where they are from.

It's all right to rely on a host for tools to set up your basic design, but to add more advanced touches, you'll want to do some of your own work. You need to incorporate your personality into the website, and that can be done by adjusting some stuff and adding others that the host design tools don't offer.

After reading this advice, it should be easy for you to start your website. Create a budget and get some help from advisers while you start planning your site. It's possible to put together a website that does what you want for a reasonable cost, but you must get started.




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