Monday, 28 January 2013

Great Web Design For The Beginning Webmaster

By Doyle Milnor


As a web designer myself, I can say that learning as much as I could from experts was how I got started. I looked at their sites, checked out their code, and even borrowed from their designs. Today there is a great deal of information available to help you get into the game, and this article is a great place to start learning.

If user or customer agreements are found on our website, speak plainly in them, avoiding legal jargon as much as possible. You want your customers to feel like they know what is going on and being said. Legal jargon will confuse your customers, and it will make them uneasy about your site.

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. You can find out more about us on Zling Design.

When you are designing your site, be aware of how many links you are using. The more links you have on your site, the more links you are going to have to monitor for "link rot". You do not want to have a bunch of dead links on your site because you included too many to monitor when you were developing the site.

Try your best to make your site entertaining by putting graphics on your site. You want to do things like wrap texts around images so that your site doesn't look so bland. When you have content that looks like it took time to create people become interested in your site and come back for more.

Minimize the amount of clicking or scrolling visitors must do to access information. The more a user has to click or scroll around to find the information they seek, the more likely they are to give up looking for it. Aim for having at least 400 words on every page of your site by combining pages that have content that falls below this number of words.

Remember this when posting something important on your site: High and far-left. This is how people read, from left to right, so having the most important parts of your site located at the top of your site and on the left will ensure that your visitors see and read this before anything else on your website. Zling can help you to solve this issue.

If your website is going to store personal user information, make sure that your web design incorporates proper security practices. As an obvious example, do not store user passwords in a plain-text file that is accessible through the browser. You should instead store them in an encrypted database, and utilize proper access restrictions. Ensuring the privacy and security of your users will help build trust in your website.

Avoid using frames. Most sites have abandoned frames on their own as better alternatives have become available, but there are still sites out there that are trapped in 1996. Alternatives to navigational frames include fixed-position navigation panels, having navigation in multiple areas (e.g. left and bottom) or simplifying page structure so that navigational links are never far away.

Keep the size of your web pages small. A lot of modern web pages are full of unnecessary elements, including huge images, Flash advertising, and lots of AJAX. Many people, especially those in rural areas and other countries with less-developed internet infrastructure, don't have high-speed Internet and will have to wait forever for a large page to load.

Make sure you have a good idea about what types of pages you want to add to your website. Site design is only easy if you plan ahead thoroughly. If you need a contact page, a sales page, various landing pages, etc, make sure you add them all early on. You can always edit as needed as the site starts to take shape.

Using the advice from this article you can become a good web designer in no time, and you should now feel a bit more confident and think so as well. So now that you have some insightful knowledge on the subject you can apply that towards your web design efforts and become a great designer of websites in no time.




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