The Better WWW Designers 2021... Tip No. 37 Of 905
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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.
Optimize your website's load times. If a visitors has to wait long periods of time for items on your site to load, then they'll wish to exit your site. Reduce graphics, scripts and Flash consoles on your web page, optimize HTML and utilize SSI files.
Make sure you design your website with older Internet Explorer versions in mind. People may say they dislike Internet Explorer, but a majority of them still use it. This creates problems for web designers, but there are things that can be done. For instance, IE has suffered a "box model bug" for multiple years.
Ensure that the site can be scanned with ease. Usability tests indicate that the majority of online users fail to read content in its entirety, scanning instead for bits of information that are of interest to them. Using text that is emphasized to break it into sections that are easily scanned ensures your readers are more likely to return. Put your most vital information near the top. When visitors are able to locate what they are looking for, they will be happier.
If you are designing a commercial website, you do not want to use free web hosting. This brings annoying ads onto your site, and it detracts from a professional look to your commerce site. Instead, pay for some basic or professional web hosting, in which you do not have to put up with this.
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.
Make sure your business logo is well-designed and prominently on every page of your site. Your logo is a key component of your brand, and it should be one of the first things people see when they go to your website. If you can't come up with a good idea for a logo, there are design firms that will make you one at relatively low cost.
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.
Work on your time management skills when developing a website if you hope to get it done in a timely fashion. There are all kinds of small tasks when building a site that can be tempting to put off. Next thing you know, the small tasks have grown in numbers. Therefore, you must finish up these tasks as quickly as possible.
Make sure that you periodically go back and try to remember all that you've learned thus far. One of the biggest problems people have when they first start check out this site with web design is that they learn one or two things and forget them a couple of days later, which can hurt their website progress.
When you design your view website, avoid using a variety of different fonts. Also think about how fonts look for different people. Small serif fonts like Times New Roman can be difficult to read on small screens. Verdana is a font used by many sites. It is easy to read in most sizes and colors.
Although the tools that a host makes available for web design can help you arrange your site's basic layout, you shouldn't rely on them exclusively. You want a site that truly reflects your personality and business image, and that requires some custom options not offered by these tools.
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.
White space is an important part of web design, so don't be afraid to use it. Cluttering up your web pages with too many images or too much text, or using a distracting background, will only irritate your visitors. White space can make the important elements of your page more visible.
Frames have not been used on websites since the 90's. Frames were of great use in the early days of web design, but it had a lot of flaws. Frame designs make scrolling frustrating and it makes sites more difficult to bookmark. Use other ways to make your site easier to navigate instead.
Your site should be optimized to handle older Internet Explorer versions. People usually say they hate Internet Explorer, but many people still use it. You will have to use workarounds when dealing with this issue, so keep that in mind. Make sure you look at the very vexing "box model bug" that IE experienced.
