Choosing A Creative Look For Your Website

No matter what sort of website you have, it is important to make sure that it follows the principles of good web design. A poorly designed website will drive away visitors and frustrate those few who persevere. The following article can help you design a high quality website and attract more traffic. Make sure that you use the right anchor text. The anchor text of a link should clearly describe what the visitor should expect to see when he clicks on the link. For instance, if a link leads to your widget ordering page, the anchor text might read "Order widgets." Specifically avoid using "click here" as anchor text. 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. Go right ahead and take some time to brainstorm different ideas that you have and let them sit for a couple of days. Then come back and see if you like these ideas later on and if you want to discuss them with other people so that you have an idea of whether or not your ideas are in the right direction or not. Every website designer needs a good platform to test their work out on, and XAMPP is probably the best out there. XAMPP will allow you to run your test sites with PHP and mySQL, so you will always be able to spot anything that needs to be changed. XAMPP is a relatively light download and it's also easy to figure out. A great tip for people trying to decide on what type of website they want to design is to understand that inspiration can come from anywhere. Be it a movie, hanging out with your friend, or simply people watching, you can find the idea for your next website any number of ways. Don't use splash pages for your site unless required by law, and especially don't use a Flash intro. Most people just want to get to your content as quickly as possible, and don't care to look at useless splash pages. If you have some amusing content that you absolutely want visitors to see, integrate it into the homepage instead. Use a descriptive title. Many site owners forget to name their pages, or name them something generic, such as "Welcome Page." Search engines do use title descriptions in their rankings, so make sure you are as descriptive as possible, without going overboard. Make sure it is usable for your viewers and the search engines. If you find yourself stuck in the design process, remember that you have the entire Internet at your disposal to look for examples. There are literally millions of websites that you can browse to find the inspiration that you need. Find a website that you like, identify what makes that website appealing, and determine if it is an idea that you can borrow and improve upon. Keep in mind that in order for your website to be truly successful, it is not enough to simply borrow ideas. You must also improve upon them. A great way to determine your website appeal is to check your site's statistics every time you update the site. You will be able to tell who is visiting your site and which pages they're spending the most time on. This will give you an idea on what to update to keep them coming back for more. As you have seen, the principles of good web design are not terribly mysterious or difficult to implement. However, too many websites still ignore these basic techniques. Do not let your site fall into this category. Put these techniques into practice to design a website that you can be proud of.