Your One-Stop Shop For Helpful Web Design Advice

http://www.programmingisnothard.com/topics/software-craftsmanship-guild
Your One-Stop Shop For Helpful Web Design Advice
Learning how to become successful in web design can seem overwhelming at times. Yet if you read through you can learn some insightful information on how to become a success in web design so you can concentrate on reaching your future endeavors.

Avoid using so-called "mystery meat navigation". This involves using unlabeled images or other elements for the site's navigation. In many cases, the visitor has to mouse over the buttons to even see what they do. Navigation is best kept simple. Use text links across the top or along the left side of the page.

A fast website is a good website. Visitors can quickly become impatient and leave your site if it loads too slowly. They will often move on to another site and usually never return to yours.

Learn about shortcuts, and use them often. Almost everything has a shortcut in web design, and if you take the time to look them over, you'll find quick ways to do almost everything. There are even HTML codes that allow you to make fast changes to each of your pages without having to re-upload them.

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.

Make your links obvious. Customers do not like spending time wading through your site searching for something they are interested in. Having a site map, as well as providing big, prominent links will help your viewer find what they are looking for without wasting time in a hunt. Lead them to your information.

To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages.

Wherever your logo appears on your site, you should accompany it with a complementary slogan or tagline. Ideally, this tagline should be catchy and informative, and should offer some basic summary of the purpose of your site or product offering. The combination of your logo and tagline should appear on every page to create a sense of cohesion.

To help you design a site that is easy for people to read all the information, make sure the pages are not too wide. If the pages are not too wide then they will fit on most people's computer screens. If the page is too wide, then part of your valuable information could be left off the page.

To work out the visual aspects of your site design, you can use a program like Photoshop to create mockups. Photoshop or other similar programs, can advance you into a professional arena quickly. Not having this software can lead to a design which looks amateurish and untrusthworthy.

Do not use blinking, scrolling text or other animations. Also, steer clear of sounds or music that plays automatically. All of these things are distracting to users and provide nothing of value. In addition, connection speeds vary from one site visitor to the next, and everyone does not have the same speed. Those users with slower connections will resent the slow-loading elements of your site.

Using proper and high-quality meta tags on your website is crucial to proper web design and attracting more traffic. High-quality meta tags will let the search engines know what your website is about. Poor or useless tags that are irrelevant to your site will deter future and returning visitors.

It is important to remember to test your website's design on various web browsers. Each web browser interprets websites slightly differently, and in some cases these differences can have drastic effects on the user experience. You can easily discern which browsers are used frequently. Use different browsers to test your website, even mobile web browsers.

So now that you know what it takes to become a great web designer you should feel a lot more confident with handling any website. Whether it is a site that you want to work on for yourself or for business related matter you know what it takes to design websites to become successful and reach your goals.