Created by-Ryan Rojas

Website design helps you create an effective site. By educating yourself to website design with current information, you can compete with builders who spent years in college learning last years techniques. Read on and you will be given the advice you need to take your skills up a notch.



Avoid using so-called "mystery meat navigation". This involves using unlabeled images or other elements for the site's navigation. In many cases, the visitor has to mouse over the buttons to even see what they do. Navigation is best kept simple. Use text links across the top or along the left side of the page.

Don't disable the visitor's right-click functionality. Some sites do this in order to prevent people from copying and pasting text or saving images from the site. The thing is, it doesn't work and disables other useful functions. OCR can be used to capture text from such sites, and grabbing images is as simple as taking a screenshot.

To help your website visitors find their way home on your site, always include a link to your homepage on each page of your site. Having a home page link that is visible allows your reader to easily make their way back to starting point. If you do not have a home page link then your visitors might get frustrated and leave your site altogether.

Be sure the websites you're designing are cross-browser compatible. You must check your site in the most popular versions of every top browser. Some examples include Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Many users use these browsers for surfing online, so you need to be sure your designs are being seen correctly on whatever they use.

Research your keywords. Of course, fresh content should be your main focus, but you must also optimize your site. Proper keywords will make visitors want to stay longer.

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.

Using a host's design tools to build your website is a good idea for the basic layout, but you don't want to rely on the design tools completely. You want a site that truly reflects your personality and business image, and that requires some custom options not offered by these tools.

Always make sure that your site design works well on every browser. Your coding might look great in Firefox, but it could be askew in Internet Explorer. You need to find out exactly how things look in all browsers and then code in a way that leaves your site looking the same on every popular browser.

A lot of times when you load up a page to your file server, you cannot find it when you type in the address via your browser. You always need to double-check and ensure that you named the file correctly. Some people literally waste days trying to pinpoint the problem they believe is major, when in reality it's only a simple typo.

Optimize your website of old versions of the IE browser. People seem to hate this browser, but many still use older versions. IE doesn't render some modern design elements very well, so it may require a workaround. Make sure Web Page Design look at the very vexing "box model bug" that IE experienced.

Any good website design must include the proper planning as you are getting started. This planning process includes selecting a domain and a hosting package as well as planning out the information layout and designs. Planning is essential to website creation, as it gets you ready beforehand to carry out your idea of the website.

Always use the same type of fonts so that guest to your site don't become agitated by reading different types of fonts. You want people to browse through the site with ease so that they can just concentrate on the material on the site and what the site has to offer.

Don't use too many different fonts or text colors on your web pages. Word processing or web authoring software may present a dizzying array of specialty fonts or wacky colors, but if you use too many, the text on your website may become unreadable. A good practice is to use just one or two fonts per page and avoid excessive use of bold or italic text.

Find out how effective your site's design is with usability tests. These tasks involve finding information on your website. Should the site be designed well, the task is easy for the user to complete. If it isn't, the task helps you understand how to improve your website.

Don't limit your creativity by using the first free or most well known name in website design software. There are virtually unlimited numbers of free and open source packages that will help you to create amazing sites. By using the one that everybody knows the best, you risk producing a site that looks a lot like theirs.

Try to learn as much as you can about CSS. HTML is important, but the consistency and actual design is in CSS. These style sheets are used as reference guides to help sites keep pages consistent in their feel and look. This can make it simple to get things changed universally on a site. For example, if you decide to switch your font to blue, all it takes is making a quick change to the code.

When you learn a new site design tactic, you should double-check how accurate it is before you implement it on your site. A faulty tactic may mess up your code and your entire site, so it's important that you ensure it's a working tactic before you apply it to your website.

When designing your website, make sure that users can easily access it without a lot of waiting or other trouble. Your visitors are interested in getting specific information about your products or services when they come to your site. They do not want to see a fancy, time-consuming introduction or wait forever for graphics to load.

One tip that every web designer should use is to create a to-do list for themselves. While it may seem rather trivial, a to-do list is a great way to structure all your tasks in one place so that you know what you have accomplished and what you still need to do.

Obviously Find Out More above don't cover every single aspect of web page design. You will have to research further if there is more you need to know about the subject. As you can see, though, the tips provided here will help you get and stay on the right path. Use these tips wisely to build a great site.