Web Design: Information You Can Use

From blogs to storefronts, great web design is always key in presenting your content to the world. Who will trust what you have to say if your site looks unprofessional? The information contained in this article will help you to build a website which looks great, functions cleanly and brings you the traffic you deserve!

Use images wisely. Bitmap images do not tend to fare well for internet use, and some GIFs do not work well with lots of color. Image size is important as well, as larger images may make your viewers have to wait for them to download. Choose smaller images, and use them sparingly to make your site more manageable.

Avoid pop-ups. There is nothing worse than visiting a website and getting assaulted by tons of pop-up ads. The vast majority of users will just exit a site with pop-ups. You can avoid losing customers and visitors, by simply refusing to allow pop-up ads on your website. As well, if your web host makes it mandatory that you have pop-up advertising, look into a new host asap. Its not worth the annoyance level they create.

To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k.

Learning some basic HTML will help you add some interesting extras to your site. For example, you can have words that follow your cursor, or a banner that flashes important information. Make sure to change the colors and fonts occasionally, so you seem more involved with the web site and its design.

Your website should be optimized to include older versions of web browsers such as Internet Explorer. While IE is the bane of everyday browsing these days, you would be surprised how many people use outdated browsers for web surfing. The older versions do not render all site elements to comply with web standards, which means using workarounds. Specifically, read about the "box model bug" that plagued IE for years.

To help you create good web pages and fix mistakes on your own, learn computer languages. Educating yourself on how a website actually works will help you quickly fix any mistakes. Knowing how to deal with problems on your site will save you time and money, as you will not have to rely on outside help to remedy the situation.

Check link integrity on a regular basis. The best time to do this is just before you FTP the page over to the server. A visitor who comes across a broken link will question how dated all of the content on your site might be. In order to prevent this from occurring, proactively test thoroughly for full functionality.

Try to make sure that any music or pictures that youre linking to is hosted on your own web server. Do not hotlink to any other website images. This can be construed as bandwidth theft and it could put you in violation of a copyright too. Its not worth the risk.

Enroll in a periodic web design newsletter to help you to occasionally re-focus on your web design vision. Regardless of the experience level, newsletters are valuable for all web designers.

I hope youve learned from this article and feel confident that youre ready to get started in the world of web design. Whether you are just starting to create your own site or you plan to build websites as a career, your first step is learning how its done. Now you can move on to the fun stuff, enjoy!