Practical Web Design Tips That Work

Designing a website takes time, patience and a little bit of know-how. It can be easy if you already know what goes into great design, such as SEO and useful navigation. Read on to find some great tips and tricks which will help you build the website of your dreams!

HTML5 video is set to become the next standard for displaying videos on the web and naturally, you should offer both a way in which users can stream your content through an HTML5 format as well as another format such as flash for those who have an older browser version.

Don’t force users to install strange BHOs. Many tech-savvy users won’t do it. Common offenders include unusual video players, image viewers, and platforms for interactive games. For most standard use cases, there is a trusted plugin, such as Windows Media Player or even Flash) that will do what you want without driving away users.

Use a tracking service, rather than displaying your visitor counter for all to read. Many websites still display their counters, yet they do not serve any real purpose. There are many high quality tracking services available, and some are even free. Use these instead of showing off how many people visit you.

If you have never designed a web page, try using pre-made layouts. These can easily be found online for several blogging web sites like Blogspot or Tumblr. Having an interesting layout will draw attention to content and give the site a professional look. Just make sure your layout is appealing to your target audience!

If you want more visitors to your site, you need to design it in a way that makes it easy to update content. If your site can be easily updated it helps you to be able to quickly add new and relevant information. A site that is constantly updated will keep your visitors coming back for more.

Make text easy to ready by using colors that contrast or backgrounds that are easy to read text on. When your text is harder to read because the background or text color creates eye strain or portions of text that are unreadable, site visitors are less likely to stick around.

Organize your links and avoid putting too many links in one area of your site. Doing this can confuse visitors and make them leave your site. If you do have many low- to mid-importance links, emulate the “blogrolls” seen in many blogs and tuck them away in a column on the right side of the page.

Great meta tags can attract visitors to your website. Quality meta tags describe your site for search engines. If you have poorly thought out the meta tags that have no reflection on what your sites content is, you will not be getting many visitors.

Avoid frames at all costs. Just don’t use them. While they can make it simple for your menu or header to appear all throughout your site, the address bar won’t change on each page. This can make it impossible for your visitors to link to any specific page on your site.

When designing a website for a mobile application, it’s important that you pick the right screen resolution. From an Android to an iPad, the sites are going to be displayed on the devices differently. If you’re hoping for the best results, go with a screen resolution that looks good on any type of screen.

Spend some time and money on books that will assist you in learning web design. Start out simple by purchasing books that are in line with your level of expertise, then gradually upgrade.

Imitation might be the best form of flattery, but when it comes to web design it’s important to develop your own ideas. Come up with your own features and designs, and improve upon things you see all across the web. Your web design work will be more effective and more memorable if you remember to keep it creative.

Learning from the experts can be done in person, online through chat or email, through their personal or professional blog or even through books they’ve written. If you seek out professional guidance and stay dedicated to educating yourself, you will almost certainly develop professional-quality web design skills.

Before you begin creating your website, it can be beneficial to have your design laid out as a wire-frame image on your computer, or drawn out on a piece of paper. This will provide you with a reference that you can look back to as you begin implementing your ideas. It can be an effective organization tool, and additionally, can serve as a prototype to identify potential problems early on.

Are you searching for info on building a site? If so, don’t waste money on literature. It is not necessarily a bad investment. There are lots of helpful books on the subject. But you can find this information for free. Expensive books won’t have any more helpful information than free books.

Creativity is what separates ordinary sites from the extraordinary ones, so never be afraid to get a little creative. As long as you’re staying on topic and are keeping the site functioning properly, you can get a little creative. People visiting your site want to see originality. They wouldn’t visit your site at all if they wanted the same old stuff.

Optimize every image you use for the web. If you look through the internet, you can find a lot of examples of images that are too large and they slow down the webpage’s load time. Make sure you have optimized each image you use. Save the image as a JPEG or GIF and aim for the file size to be somewhere between 5k and 20k.

Now that you’ve read the ideas in this article, you should be able to go forth and design a website which will rival those of your competition. Keep learning to find new techniques to increase your traffic, add new content and boost your page to the top of your market!