Your Site Style Guide: Exactly what You Had to Know
1. Your Site Style Guide: Exactly what You Had to Know
Websites have several purposes these days. It can be a social networking tool, an entertainment
portal or a place to get information. No matter how you use it, websites need knowledgeable
webmasters so that they get designed properly. Here you'll get some tips on website design that will
help you make a great website.
Make sure all links on your website are working properly before you publish your site. Visitors will
be annoyed if they click on broken links. Either use a program to check for broken links or check
each link manually.
Make sure advanced web design all of your webpages actually have titles, and make sure they are
descriptive. A surprising number of webpages out there are called "untitled document" or "new
document". This not only denies visitors a useful piece of information to remember your site, but also
absolutely destroys your SEO, since search engines weight page titles heavily when ranking sites.
Frames have not been used on websites since the 90's. Frames were popular back then but created a
lot of problems. Frame designs make the bookmarking difficult on your visitors, and it also makes
scrolling a chore as well. There are more modern ways to build layouts today.
Learn about shortcuts, and use them often. In web page design, there are lots of shortcuts that will
decrease the amount of time it takes to do things. It doesn't take that long to learn about the HTML
code that you can insert into your website's design to help you edit any page without having to
upload the page again.
Regardless of how the design of your website is created aesthetically, be sure to make all of your
files small. This is because the size of the files dictates the speed at which your website loads. You
want your website to load as quickly as possible. Remember, too, that some visitors may be using
dial-up or other low-speed connections. Check out your website on all types of connections,
including a dial up connection.
To help keep your site visitors happy, do not underline words. Underline words on the internet
signifies that the word is a clickable link. If you have too many words on your pages that are
underlined with being clickable links, then your visitors will be frustrated after continuously trying
to click on them.
Learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Although there are many templates that allow you to just fill in
the blanks, in order to create a web page, these templates provide only limited design possibilities.
Understanding how the mark-up language and stylesheet work together will enable you to customize
your website to your heart's content.
2. 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.
Before you purchase hosting for your site, know exactly what you need and what packages provide
it. Things you should be aware of are CPU usage, bandwidth and disk space, among others. Be
certain that you are aware of what you are paying for.
Test your site on multiple browsers, platforms (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc.) and devices
(Mac, PC, tablets, cell phones, etc.) Every browser will interpret
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/ the site slightly differently. Some of the slight differences can
cause navigation to be difficult for the user. There are a lot of ways you can determine which
browsers are most popular at the current time. Check how your site behaves on all the major
browsers for both PCs and mobile devices.
Make sure that the computer you're using is advanced enough to run programs like Photoshop and
Dreamweaver. The last thing you want to do is invest money into buying programs like these then
realizing that you're computer can't run them, this can save you a headache and time by checking up
on this.
Avoid using animated GIFs on your site. These were popular in the late 1990s, but newer
technologies have replaced the uses for animated GIFs that were actually useful. Animated GIFs are
low in quality and large in file size. Use static icons for page elements and actual video files for
complex animations.
Learn as much as you can about the various forms of html, as the html is crucial to website
development. When you learn about html go ahead and make a couple of pages that are sort of filled
with the information that you want to add to any of the sites you plan on working on.
As an alternative to Photoshop, you could choose to use the GIMP photo editor. GIMP has practically
every single feature that Adobe Photoshop does; and instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a
program and using up a few hundred MBs of program space, GIMP is 100% free and runs about
35mb.
Although the more ads you have on your site the more potential you have at making money. But
make sure that you don't get too greedy and that you manage the number of ads that are on your
sites to a reasonable number, you want to make your site feel open and welcoming, not ad central.
There are a lot of places you can check out on the web that can help you learn html. You can learn
plenty of information from various forums and sites, and some of them even offer you updates with
the latest information that there is to know on the web which can be very beneficial to you.
When it comes to web design you don't want to be left in the dust, you want to be up to date so that
you know how to program your site as well as what people want. So even though you understand
how to build a website make sure that you always fill your brain with new knowledge.
3. You've read the advice here and are ready to put it into action, so get ready to design your site! Start
by sketching out a design and making lists of the content you'll need and you'll have your website
online in no time.
Make sure that you thoroughly check the code on each webpage that you design. A lot of WYSIWYG
editors will put a bunch of junk code on the design of your site. Go through your code and use a
validation service to make sure your code is clear enough. Validating your code is an important step
in web design, but be sure to use a good service.
There is quite a bit of information that deals with web design and you need to get a good balance of
knowledge to succeed.
