A lot of people say that designing websites is extremely challenging. However, this is only a true statement for people who are not armed with the right knowledge or advice on web design. This article contains a number of pieces of advice to help you on your way to designing on the web with ease.
Don’t neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user’s local cache thereafter.
Remember, frames are a thing of the past and while revisiting past memories can be fun, adding outdated frames will only make your designs appear to be zombies from the world wide web graveyard. Once frames were popular, but there were a lot of issues with them too. A website that uses frames can cause trouble for visitors when they try to bookmark a site, and no one wants to spend their time scrolling on a website needlessly. A number of better ways exist that make it easy for users to navigate your site.
It may look pretty, but stay away from having too many animations on your site. Having your sales splash page rotate, spin and blink may look cool to you, but it will likely drive potential viewers away. When you add too many flashy splashes like that, it makes your site look amateurish which is not the message you want to convey.
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.
Don’t pile on the graphics. Graphics are important, but too many can yuck things up. Graphics should enhance what you have to say on your site. They shouldn’t be put there to just look pretty. Having the right graphics improves your site all around.
Make sure that you use the right anchor text. The anchor text of a link should clearly describe what the visitor should expect to see when he clicks on the link. For instance, if a link leads to your widget ordering page, the anchor text might read “Order widgets.” Specifically avoid using “click here” as anchor text.
Keyword research is important. 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.
Free design software is a valuable tool for quickly setting up a website. You can use a lot of free tools to assist your building of your website, so check into the software that is available to you. Do some research and try different software to find the tools you need the most.
Keep your education ongoing. Websites are constantly changing, every day, and if you stop learning new things, you may find yourself falling behind the pack with your designs. Try to convince yourself to learn one new thing each day, be it programming a new background, or a simple HTML setup.
As this article previously mentioned, designing websites is perceived by many to be a challenging endeavor. However, web design becomes much easier for people who have the best knowledge and information on how to design websites as efficiently and creatively as possible. Apply this article’s tips, and you’ll be designing websites in no time!