Don’t let your trepidation at the thought of creating a website diminish your excitement at starting your new business. Sometimes you may not know where to begin, what to look for and what is expected of you. The following tips should give you enough information to draw up a basic plan and start building a quality website.
If you’re working on website development use the right graphics for the job. Do not use bitmap for your images as they take up too much space. GIFs can be quite good for simple text buttons, screenshots, etc and PNGs are great for images with 256 colors and up. JPEG works best for photo images.
Pay attention to your background. Some websites have backgrounds that make the website’s text hard to read, while other websites have backgrounds that contain elements that annoy visitors such as gif animations. Choose backgrounds that coordinate with your site, rather than clashing with it, and your message will be much more clear to your visitors.
Be sure to do good keyword research. Although content is important, you must develop a customer base using keywords. Knowing the right keywords will help you bring people that have an interest in the things you have on your site.
Professional Looking
Use a well known software program that is known for getting the job done to help create a professional looking website. Using a program like Photoshop can help amateur web designers create professional looking sites really fast. If you don’t use Photoshop, you may find that it will take you a long time to be able to gain the knowledge needed to make a nice website.
White is generally a safe background color to use when designing a professional website. White puts the focus on the content, making it easier to read. If you are trying to to exude a professional tone, a white background lends a trustworthy feeling to your site. Complicated, artsy background designs look cool, but they can often be distracting to the reader. Simple is almost always the best option for background.
Consider visitors when constructing your site. The focus of the end user should always be at the forefront of the designer’s mind. This includes user experience, usability, user interaction, and accessibility. These are vital considerations you must take into account. Putting yourself in your customers shoes can really help you to design the best page possible.
Are you stuck? Look online for inspiration. Look through the millions of websites online to get great ideas about how to design your own. Find an interesting site and borrow features that will work on your site. Borrow ideas and create your own to build a truly unique page. Make sure you improve upon the ideas that you like.
Do not include a website counter; it just doesn’t look good. This might seem interesting at first glance, but your visitors find this distasteful. Use a different way to monitor your traffic.
Classic Text Editors
Development platforms make the code for you, however, there are some that aren’t as trustworthy as the classic text editors. With a platform, you design the features and the platform provides the code, which can then be pasted wherever you want. But if you desire a true creator experience and want to reduce errors, stick with classic text editors.
Building small websites can help you see what areas to get better at. 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.
A basic layout should be used for your site in the beginning, this way you can get an understanding of the basics of website development. Beginning with a no-frills site allows you to constantly innovate and change things as you learn new techniques.
Try not to steer consumers on your website into different places other than what they are presently interested in. Don’t use annoying pop-up surveys that won’t go away unless the visitors take action. If you take away the ability to move freely around your website, your readers are going to quickly get frustrated and want to leave your site.
Avoid wasting time by programming your domain and user name into your file server. When you enter the server, you will have instant access to everything that you have personally stored. This saves a lot of time.
Make sure someone is testing your website’s functionality as you go along. Every time you make a change, a neutral viewer should give you their opinion. What may look fine to you, may be of major concern to someone else. Do your best to gather outside opinions.
Focus your best material “high up and over to the left.” Since left to right is the normal reading pattern for most people, having important things on your site to the top left will make sure that your visitors are noticing it regularly.
Be sure you don’t have ads on your page that are way too big because that distracts people. You need to be sure people are very comfortable when they’re visiting the site you have up, so be kind to them. Only add content that won’t clutter up other content, and folks will view your site as professional, and a site they’d like to return to in the future.
After reading this advice, it should be easy for you to start your website. Develop a plan on what you can spend on the site, seek out those who can advise you, and start a rough draft of your website. If you get started as soon as possible, it will be easier to build an efficient, visually striking website.