When many people hear the term “web design”, they often think of hours of time and energy spend writing long lines of code and creating graphical images for a website. Web design is easier than most people believe, and the web design tips in the following article will prove just that.
Add a prominent tagline to your website. The tagline includes a motto or clever phrase that speaks to the purpose of your business. The tagline serves to entice people to linger at your website rather than just pass through. Research shows that visitors spend roughly 8 seconds deciding if a website is worth exploring further. So make your tagline count.
Avoid using so-called “mystery meat navigation”. This involves using unlabeled images or other elements for the site’s navigation. In many cases, the visitor has to mouse over the buttons to even see what they do. Navigation is best kept simple. Use text links across the top or along the left side of the page.
Make sure all of your webpages actually have titles, and make sure they are descriptive. A surprising number of webpages out there are called “untitled document” or “new document”. This not only denies visitors a useful piece of information to remember your site, but also absolutely destroys your SEO, since search engines weight page titles heavily when ranking sites.
Use a newsletter to gain repeat visitors. By giving your visitors an opportunity to keep current on your site offerings, you increase their loyalty. Place the signup form in a sidebar on your site, and keep track of the people that sign up. You can avoid some reputation-damaging trouble by making sure that your newsletter only goes out to visitors who have explicitly requested it.
Test your website in the most popular browsers and platforms to make sure that it displays correctly. Sometimes scripts that work in one browser may not produce the same results in another browser. So you may need take extra measures, like adding a function for browser detection, in order to ensure that your website will display properly under most conditions.
To help your visitors be able to easily read your site, you should design it using contrasting colors. If you use colors that contrast, it makes the text stand out. If you have black text with a black background you will not be able to see the information, but if you have black text with a white background it becomes simple to read.
Use free software to set up your own site. While it is widely thought that pricey software and tools are the only solutions to building a quality website, there are actually vast amounts of free software and tools available on the Internet. Both of which can help you as you start the design process and to keep your site up and running. Hit your favorite search engine and do research to find a piece of software that suits your needs.
As stated before, people think of hours of coding and creating images when they think about web design. They don’t realize that web design isn’t as complicated as they believe. Using the tips from this article, anyone will see how easy web design is and use it to create their own website.
