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23 October 2012

Make Web Design A Snap with This Advice

By Guy Giberson


When a web designer is gifted, what they produce can be truly stunning. The best web designs set that website apart from its competition. Educate yourself if you want to become a great web designer. Keep reading to learn more about good designs.

Test the functionality of your website. It is important to do this for each step. Each time you change your website or add something, have a friend visit your site and try it out. A video that loads slowly may mean nothing to you, but someone else may disagree. Even more importantly, a video may load quickly for you, but not load at all for someone else. Always look to others for outside and unbiased opinions.

Use free software to set up your own site. There is a pervasive myth that expensive programs do the job of web design better than the alternatives, but there is plenty of free software that does a great job. Do some research and try different software to find the tools you need the most.

Designing a website can be very affordable if you do it yourself. For every expensive, useful, and popular web design tool, there is an equally useful tool you can find that costs a lot less. There are plenty of free software options that function in the same way as commercial software. You can realize significant savings by seeking out such open source alternatives for your software needs.

Use basic fonts, which every user will be able to see. You can tell if a site is professional just by viewing their fonts. Stay away from Comic Sans or other fancy looking fonts that are not on every computer. In case your user's browser cannot display the font your website uses, a secondary font can be set. This can look worse.

Steer clear of captchas. Encountering a captcha pulls a website visitor out of passive viewing, and forces them to solve a relatively complicated problem to continue. Unless visitors are already addicted to your site, they will probably leave your site in search of simpler pastures.

A little sound goes a long way in website design. You do not want to annoy your visitors by throwing a lot of sound at them that they cannot turn off as soon as they open your website. Links to videos and separate audio files are fine. The important thing is that all visitors have control over whether or not your site plays sounds when they visit it.

Make sure to preserve personal information that may need to be entered again by the same user of your website. Save users' information like registration data, so it does not have to be entered more than once on different forms. Saving the user's information in this way simplifies work for them, and is much appreciated by your website visitors.

You do not have to do everything yourself. Effective web design requires the developer to understand a variety of different disciplines, including programming, SEO, usability, and graphic design principles. Feel free to enlist professional help to make your website better. When it comes to those web design areas that you lack expertise in, hiring a specialist or a professional company may be well worth the cost.

If you are creating multiple pages for your website, you should take advantage of your operating system's copy/paste functions. Instead of rewriting HTML code for each new page, copy the necessary components, adjust the parts that require it and then save the results with a new filename each time you do this. By doing this, you can continue to use the master copy over and over again.

If you are designing a very large site, you should always include search capabilities. On your homepage in the corner to the upper right-hand, you can add a search box, which lets users search for a term on your site. Google and FreeFind both offer search functions for your website.

The truth is that popups and links that try to open new browser windows are irritating to the vast majority of your website visitors. In fact, a lot of users have pop-ups turned off entirely. Therefore, it is best to stay away from these types of strategies. So, instead of opting to use this technique, try to see how you can improve on your website's navigation system in another way.

Make sure you give your users the option to cancel a given action if they choose to. An action may refer to signing up for e-mail notifications, newsletter subscriptions or filling out web forms. When you do not allow visitors to cancel something they do not wish to complete, you are forcing them into something, which can prove detrimental to fostering return visits and/or purchases.

If you are looking to create your own site, then consider trying a grid or shared hosting, rather than using a dedicated host or VPS. This is due to the fact that you will not be sure how much traffic your website will be getting, and you do not want to pay more, or less, than you need to.

Web design can yield absolutely gorgeous results when done correctly. It is easy to tell a bad design from a good one, and there are methods to help you design better sites. By following the previously mentioned tips, you will create web pages that are a pleasure to view.




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