Designing you own website can be an exciting prospect and an overwhelming one! Use this article to help you get a good background, both on what all it entails and how to best implement it.
When you are working on your web design, use the proper graphics needed for the task. Do not use bitmap for your images as they take up too much space. Use a GIF instead if the image contains over 256 colors and PNG for test buttons and screen shots. For photos, you can use JPEG images.
It may look pretty, but stay away from having too many animations on your site. Having your sales splash page rotate, spin and blink may look cool to you, but it will likely drive potential viewers away. When you add too many flashy splashes like that, it makes your site look amateurish which is not the message you want to convey.
Incorporate a site map into your website. Site maps serve several purposes. First, they make navigation throughout your site much easier for visitors. Second, the major search engines can utilize it to index your entire site. This means your search engine optimization improves, and your website receives more exposure, giving you more profit-earning potential.
Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.
To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k.
Research keywords. Your customers should always be the top focus, but search engine optimization is still necessary to bring those customers to your pages. You need to understand the proper keywords that will attract visitors to your website.
Make text easy to ready by using colors that contrast or backgrounds that are easy to read text on. When your text is harder to read because the background or text color creates eye strain or portions of text that are unreadable, site visitors are less likely to stick around.
White is an effective and visually attractive background color for a website. Studies show that a white background with black text is the easiest for people to read, leading your content to appear expert and trustworthy. You will come across as an amateur if your site design is cluttered and distracting. When it comes to backgrounds, simpler is generally better.
Try to make sure that any music or pictures that you're linking to is hosted on your own web server. Do not get more info hotlink to any other website images. This can be construed as bandwidth theft and it could put you in violation of a copyright too. It's not worth the risk.
Try including real customer testimonials. Very few want to be the first to try a product or service, so let customers know that others have tried your wares and that they were pleased with them. Try asking some clients that have done projects with you to create a short paragraph about their experience with your company, to put on your site.
Do not clutter your website by using every square pixel of space that you have available. You will make your visitors feel overwhelmed if you use all the space available. Try to create a good amount of space within your site's content, this allows your visitors to clearly see the page and give them a much better viewing experience. Sometimes, empty space can contribute to the look of a page as nicely as content does.
When you learn a new site design tactic, you should double-check how accurate it is before you implement it on your site. A faulty tactic may mess up your code and your entire site, so it's important that you ensure it's a working tactic before you apply it to your website.
Site maps are an excellent piece of technology that allow users and search engines to get a better view of your site's functions and layouts without extra work. Include a link to your sitemap from the homepage and leave it as simple as possible. The sitemap doesn't need fancy graphics or fonts, just layout your website and update it when needed.
Focusing on your target audience is important even for website design. For instance, if you're designing a site in order to sell winter coats, you're not exactly going to have a beach themed background with Joe Strummer tunes playing upon entry. Keep your site closely related to its targeted audience.
As stated before, just about everyone, including you, has wanted to create a website. People have had ideas on what their website will be like for years, but become stuck in the actual creation process. This hurdle can be easily jumped from using the web design tips mentioned in the article above.