Design Stellar Web Pages By Using These Ideas

Have you ever designed a website? If you have, then you understand just how frightening this can be. Creating a web identity for yourself or anyone else can be intimidating. The following article will provide you with advice to get you the website design you desire.

Keep your pages to a reasonable length. Add content through new pages on your site, instead of tacking it on to the end of a home page. For the most part, readers are hesitant to keep going on a page that seems to scroll on forever. If you must have a lot of content on one page, include hyperlinks at the top and in sections throughout the page. This allows users to navigate through the available content without excessive scrolling.

Use shortcuts when designing your website. When it comes to web design, there are many shortcuts; as you become more familiar with the field, you are sure to find fast ways of doing just about everything. For example, there are HTML codes that can let you make quick changes to your site without needing to re-upload the page.

Make your links obvious. Customers do not like spending time wading through your site searching for something they are interested in. Having a site map, as well as providing big, prominent links will help your viewer find what they are looking for without wasting time in a hunt. Lead them to your information.

Learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Although there are many templates that allow you to just fill in the blanks, in order to create a web page, these templates provide only limited design possibilities. Understanding how the mark-up language and stylesheet work together will enable you to customize your website to your heart's content.

No matter what type of website you design or who the audience is you want to target, always keep the page load time under ten seconds. Sites that are well-made and efficient will open in a browser in moments. Many online users want instant gratification, so you should provide that.

To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages.

Keep the sizes of your files and images small. Excessive loading times are a death knell for any site. The larger the files are that must load, the longer a user's load time is going to be. Most users will click away if the page doesn't start to load within the first few seconds of opening your page.

Do not use blinking, scrolling text or other animations. Also, steer clear of sounds or music that plays automatically. All of these things are distracting to users and provide nothing of value. In addition, connection speeds vary from one site visitor to the next, and everyone does not have the same speed. Those users with slower connections will resent the slow-loading elements of your site.

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.

If you want your website to get more visitors, take care to use relevant, up-to-date meta tags on every page of your site. Properly used meta tags make it easier for search engines to classify your site correctly. Not putting enough effort into their content can severely hurt your page rank and reduce your traffic.

Which file formats you use for graphics is key to user satisfaction. In general, JPEGs and GIFs are best for graphics. You want to avoid PNG or BMP files as these take up too much memory space. By converting your file types to more manageable sizes, you will provide your visitors with a better experience.

For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. Not only is this good for search engine optimization, but it is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible.

If you expect many people to contribute to the content of the website, incorporating a content management system (CMS) into the design of the website might be a good idea. A CMS will make it easier for everyone to add to and update the content without needing a high level of technical knowledge. These systems are easy to use, and can make publishing content on the website much more efficient.

Now that you've reached the end of this article, you are probably itching to go out there and design a killer website. Armed with the knowledge that you've gotten from this article, you should be able to do just that. Use this information and your best instincts to design the site of your dreams.

At Just by Design, we are known for our creativity, our excellent customer service and our commitment to providing small to midsize businesses with affordable options for their web and graphic design projects. Call us to get started or check us out online at http://www.justbydesign.com