Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Simple Tips To Help You Design Great Web Pages

By Eladia Left


In today's business world everyone seems to have a website, but if you are not familiar with how to build one then it could be a problem. However, it is not that difficult since there are many software programs on the market that make it easy for any new business to create a nice website. Continue on for some great web design tips.

It is always good to add a favicon to your website. The favicon is a 16x16 image file in the .Ico format. This image is the one you see next to the URL bar, next to the title of the page on an opened tab and is also visible on your bookmarks tab if you choose to bookmark a page. The favicon will help users quickly recognize your page in their browser without reading any text or directly viewing the page.

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.

Test your site to see if the major translation services work properly when translating your site. Some sites receive many international visitors, and these visitors sometimes use services like BabelFish and Google Translate to translate the text to their language. Certain web design problems, especially poor server side code, can break these services.

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.

Always ensure you are giving meaningful feedback, as this is what creates the communication between a website and its visitors. For example, if an action taken by a visitor results in an error, do not simply display "error occurred."? Instead, provide a message that explains what happened and how the visitor can correct the error by taking a different action. Without this feedback, visitors are more likely to grow frustrated and just give up by leaving your website.

Use a tracking service, rather than displaying your visitor counter for all to read. Many websites still display their counters, yet they do not serve any real purpose. There are many high quality tracking services available, and some are even free. Use these instead of showing off how many people visit you. 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.

Web design is a great business venture or hobby that, with the proper knowledge, can truly lead to some great sites. Without the proper knowledge, your sites can backfire. So, do yourself a favor and apply the tips that you just read to your own web designs that can put you above the rest.




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