Tired of working a 9-5 job for peanuts? If so, then website development might be a good alternative to that. If you know how to design websites, you can design them for yourself or for others. The nice thing about website development is that you can do it at any time of the day, from wherever you want. Therefore, there is more freedom in your schedule.
Use a sensible background for your site. Some sites include complex or patterned GIF backgrounds that can make text hard to read, no matter how novel it may look. Choose a background that is not too distracting for your readers, and that goes well with the rest of your design.
Always keep your opening page simple. People who are shopping around decide quickly whether to use a site or continue searching by viewing the front page. Be descriptive when you talk about your business and what you offer that is unique, but keep other information minimal to avoid your visitors getting distracted.
Be sure to do good keyword research. While giving viewers quality and up-to-date information should be your main focus, you must try building a customer base. Understanding what keywords will bring people to your site from a search engine is a needed step to becoming a successful site.
Serif Fonts
When you build a website you need to quit using a lot of fonts that confuse people. You need to also be mindful of how some fonts appear on monitors, since smaller serif fonts are difficult to read. Most websites opt for sans serif fonts, like Verdana, that looks fine in different sizes and colors.
It is important to make use of ALT tags for your images in your site design. These tags help you describe the images for people with visual impairment or people that disable images. If part of a link, you can include information about the link intention. Finally, search engine crawlers like ALT tags as they are useful. So, your search rank might improve as a result.
If you want your site to become more visible to online users, you must learn to use proper meta tags for each page. 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.
Make sure that you use file sizes for all content on your site that loads quickly for your website visitors. Keep your graphics to GIF and JPEG file formats. PNG and BMP files offer advantages for web graphics, but the file sizes are too much for internet load times. Your graphics should be converted into the types of files that can be managed size wise, thus ensuring visitors have a wonderful experience on your site.
A great “About Us” page will help your readers understand who you are and what you do. So many sites have dull, boring information on these pages. Make it a little more exciting! Give visitors insight into you, the designer. Help them understand how you began designing websites, which other designers you consider to be mentors, and where you are going from here.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is not reserving domain names immediately when they are considering owning several sites. Get creative and choose something you want, but reserve the name early to ensure you have it. Even if your idea is very original, someone else could think up the same thing. It is as if we share a collective unconscious.
Begin by making smaller websites, so you can see your strengths and weaknesses before starting a major site. Besides keeping them small, your initial efforts should also be simple. Avoid complex multimedia and advanced structures to begin with, and stick with basic pages of text and pictures.
Graphics make a site more visually appealing. Prevent a bland appearance by wrapping text around your images. Your visitors will stay longer and return more often if your content has visual appeal.
On every page, be sure that you include a tagline that is clearly visible. Use large, bold text to attract site visitors’ attention. A tagline is also useful because it offers quick information about the overall purpose of your site. Within seconds, a visitor can judge whether or not the site is relevant.
Meet with a professional web designer and learn how they do things. The easiest way to improve is to learn from someone who already knows the trade. This could be the depth of information that you need, to build a solid foundation in website creation.
Give your website’s visitors the capability to search your website, at least on your main page and ideally on every sub-page. This is vital to maximizing the usability of your site, and helping your vistors find what they need. Coding this search functionality isn’t difficult, so the increase in usability is definitely worth the time spent.
With everything you’ve learned here, you should now know more about web design. Just use the information as best you can, and soon you will be a professional web designer.