With a down-turned economy and few jobs available, many people are going online to begin a home business. Website development is critical to finding success online though. Check out these excellent tips about web page design so that your business can succeed.
Always look over your website in many types of browsers, as you are designing it. What you see on one browser is not necessarily what others see on other browsers. Research all the commonly used browsers and design accordingly. In addition, let someone who uses an operating system that differs from yours check the site for compatibility.
Make it easy for visitors to back out of a process if they change their minds. For example, put a “clear” button on a form, an unsubscribe link on all newsletters and a “cancel” button on orders. Forcing your user to complete an action they don’t wish to will ensure they never sign up for anything on your site again, nor are they likely to return at all.
A good website will never require that a visitor provide the same information more than once. Ensure that personal data for each of your website’s visitors is preserved. For example, if someone registers for your site, and some of the same information is needed to fill out another form, make sure data that they have already entered is preserved, so users do not need to re-enter this information. It’s annoying for visitors to have to re-register for different site functions, so work to make the site experience positive for your users.
Research your keywords. Of course, you must provide valuable and relevant content; however, you can optimize it with judicious use of excellent keywords. Making use of keywords is what drives traffic to your site and makes it successful.
Place personal photos on your site to make it look better. Having pictures on your website gives off a more user-friendly approach to your site. Pictures also help to keep your visitors interested and keeps them at your site longer.
Search Engines
To create a site that is well optimized for most search engines, don’t use frames. Users generally like frames, but information within frames is not picked up by the search engines. If search engines can’t reach some information on your website, your rankings will be lower. When there is a low rating, there is little traffic.
Make sure you site is optimized for previous versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, especially IE 7 and 8. Most people have a love-hate relationship with IE; however, many people are still using it, including older versions. Unfortunately, many aspects of your site may not be compatible or displayed properly due to outdated rendering standards, so you may have to create some fixes for the elements that do not work properly. Familiarize yourself with the concept of the notorious “box model bug” which caused trouble for Internet Explorer for years.
Target Audience
Before designing your site, do some research. Try to figure out what your target audience wants to see. You need to design your website so it maximizes your efforts in bringing in your target audience. Your design work will thus be much more efficient.
Use good looking graphics throughout your website. You will want text to wrap around pictures so it isn’t boring. If you content is surrounded by creative design, visitors will like your site more.
Make sure to include a search function. This makes your website more usable, content accessible and leaves visitors fulfilled. Site searches are fairly easy to implement, and the reward will far outweigh any time or effort spent.
For some people, their bandwidth is very low, and you need to consider this when putting videos up on your site. A video that is converted to 5,000 kb/s will load faster on some computers, but it might be faster than some Internet connections allow for. This means that viewers are going to be starting at the “buffering” screen more than the actual video.
Web page design and complication are not mutually exclusive. Although some methods you try out might be a bit difficult, following these tips will work to simplify the process. It does not matter why you want to start with web design; the tips you’ve just read are your starting point.