Beginning Web Designer Tips On Designing On The Web

No matter what sort of website you have, it is important to make sure that it follows the principles of good web design. A poorly designed website will drive away visitors and frustrate those few who persevere. The following article can help you design a high quality website and attract more traffic.

Make sure your webpages aren’t too long. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and if your most important content is “below the fold,” it may not even be read. If you have a lot of related content that needs to stay together, consider breaking it up into sections and adding links to each section.

Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.

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. Save users’ information like registration data, so it doesn’t have to be entered more than once on different forms. Creating transferable form information will make the overall process simpler and quicker for your visitors, and they will be happy with the time you have saved them.

Avoid using pop-up advertising. There is not a person out there who will want to visit a website and get overwhelmed with pop-up ads. It does not matter who or what the website represents, most visitors will not hang around if they are bombarded with pop-ups. Keep your customers happy, by steering clear of these annoying ads. If your host forces pop-ups on you, it may be time to find a new one.

It is imperative that all of your webpages have titles. Forgetting to include titles while designing your website can have disastrous consequences. The biggest reason is that it makes your website look unprofessional when there is no title, both on the webpage itself, and also on a search results page. Search engines also place heavy emphasis on titles when determining the content of your website. Remember to utilize keywords, and make your titles descriptive.

Optimize your website for older IE versions. The Internet community loves to hate on IE, but in truth, a large portion of Internet traffic still happens through IE. They don’t render many elements in compliance with web standards, so workarounds are required. Familiarize yourself with the concept of the notorious “box model bug” which caused trouble for Internet Explorer for years.

Try having a clear and consistent layout in the design of your sites. Clean layouts that make use of a lot of white space tend to enhance the site’s readability and overall look. The layout must be focused on the content. Try using fonts that are on every computer in order to avoid having your site appear incorrectly.

When designing a website with a lot of text, choose your fonts wisely. While serif text will work well for a title or headline, the body of the text should be in a serif font, which is easier to read on a computer screen. Try to use common computer fonts such as Times New Roman and Ariel.

As you have seen, the principles of good web design are not terribly mysterious or difficult to implement. However, too many websites still ignore these basic techniques. Do not let your site fall into this category. Put these techniques into practice to design a website that you can be proud of.