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Tuesday 8 January 2013

Tips For Making Your Website Look Professional


Understanding how a website functions does not necessarily mean that you know how to build one. Tinkering with html code and adding various design features takes a skilled hand. If you want a site that looks great, schooling yourself in web design is a wise first step. Make sure to read these design tips below if you need a hand. Have clear navigation. When a visitor comes to your site, make sure they can go through your site. You must have clear navigation to do this. Have all important links in prominent places. Try linking many pages in your site. Allow information be found from every part of the site. Make the web page sizes the smallest they can be. This will help your site load much faster overall. The faster your pages load, the more likely your visitors will stick around to view more of your site. If your site is too bulky in terms of page size, you may be in danger of having your visitor bounce to another website out of frustration. 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. One tip that every web designer could use is to keep their file sizes as small as possible. Web sites with large files take much longer to load and this frustrates people who have slower internet connections. Make sure your pages load fast by keeping file sizes to a minimum. No matter who your target audience is or what your site is intended for, you should always aim to keep loading time to ten seconds or less. A well-designed, efficient site should pop up in visitors' browsers in a matter of moments. The majority of online users demand instant gratification, and it is in your best interest to provide it. A good reason to stay on top of your site maintenance is so you can always delete negative content and spam if it happens to appear on your site. This is especially true for the blog owners out there and people with forums. A good site designer is always there to take out the trash so that it doesn't accumulate. To save money, use free stock images when designing your website. These images can be found throughout the internet and are often as high-quality as those you have to pay for. By saving money on the images you use, you can spend that money on other aspects of design and business. When designing a website with a lot of text, choose your fonts wisely. While serif text will work well for a title or headline, the body of the text should be in a serif font, which is easier to read on a computer screen. Try to use common computer fonts such as Times New Roman and Ariel. Don't use too many different fonts or text colors on your web pages. Word processing or web authoring software may present a dizzying array of specialty fonts or wacky colors, but if you use too many, the text on your website may become unreadable. A good practice is to use just one or two fonts per page and avoid excessive use of bold or italic text. For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. Not only is this good for search engine optimization, but it is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible. When designing a website, you should remember that people always read content left to right. This is the same for all web sites so make sure that you put the most important information you want the visitors to see up high and to the left side of each page. Annotate your links. Give your viewer a good idea about where the link is going to take them before they actually click the link. This description may help to catch someone's attention that would have just passed by the link because they did not know where it was going to take them. When you start to think about all of the writing for your site consider hiring someone who is good at putting words together to make your site sound more interesting overall. Good wording is a great way to draw people in and keeping them to come back to your site over and over again. Always check into exactly what your web host is proclaiming to provide before signing up with them and giving them your money. Many will claim unlimited bandwidth and other services, but this is really not the case. When reading the fine print you may discover that there are other limits on your account where you will never have the possibility of using your entire bandwidth allocation. Now that you've read the web design tips in the above text, you can see that designing a site isn't very complicated at all. It is a specialized skill, however; and you will need a good bit of accurate information to assist you. Remember to use what you've learned here to your advantage so that you can build a beautiful, flawless website.

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