If you are working on your first website design or your tenth, the design will always be the crucial aspect of your site. Seeing that the site meets certain standards of excellence in usability, content quality, and aesthetics will surely keep visitors coming back. Read on to find tips which will help you to create the site you desire.
Be sure you have a search tool that lets others search when on your site. If people visit your site for something specific, they will be on the lookout for a search box. If you don’t have one, they may go to another site which does. Always put the search box on the page’s upper right corner, since this is where visitors usually look first.
Check your copy for broken links before you publish your page. Visitors become frustrated easily when they click a link and find that it leads to the wrong place. If you have very few links, you can check them manually. If many links, try using a link-checking program that can do the work for you quickly.
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 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.
Try to code using only CSS. We’re moving away from table-based sites to only CSS sites because they are reusable, accessible, and they can greatly reduce your file sizes. This allows you greater control of the appearance of your site. There are various CSS resources you can use, therefore, knowing CSS is invaluable to web design.
As you are designing your website, keep in mind that you are not required to utilize all of the space available. Just because you have all of that space does not mean that you have to use it. Those visiting your site will actually be relieved by having extra space and not feeling overwhelming. There are many cases in which empty space is actually more valuable than other content.
Try your best to update the content of any old sites that you have. You want to make sure that any of the sites you build seem like they’re up to date with the technology that is out today – you don’t want a site that looks 10 years old.
The tips you’ve just read will help you design a fantastic site that is attractive and encourages your visitors to trust your brand. When you do this, you can’t help but achieve online success in more ways than one.
Joan Holt is a writer and stylist with a passion for the intersection between biology, technology and design. Raised in Bali and of Swedish heritage, She travels across the world have encouraged and informed a global perspective regarding the future of fashion and its relationship to planetary health. She is currently working for a sustainable fashion label in Bali, Indonesia.