Saturday, January 28, 2012

Design A Smarter Website With These Handy Tips

By Carrie Isner


Learning how to become successful in web design can seem overwhelming at times. Yet if you read through you can learn some insightful information on how to become a success in web design so you can concentrate on reaching your future endeavors.

Make sure that the computer you're using is advanced enough to run programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. The last thing you want to do is invest money into buying programs like these then realizing that you're computer can't run them, this can save you a headache and time by checking up on this.

A great tip for all web designers is to reserve the "m" subdomain name for your website. This is key if you ever plan on creating a special site strictly for mobile use and with all the smartphone out there, this is not only a good idea, it is a necessity.

Best practices in web design are constantly evolving. What was standard a year ago could be deprecated today, or even be completely unusable. This is why it is so important to stay up to date, and also crucial that you verify everything you learn. Make certain that the information you acquire is current and not outdated.

When designing your website, create independent CSS pages for the web browsers and use conditional loading. Using these techniques makes it much easier for testing and ensuing maintenance later on. All websites need to be maintained at some point, and you want it to be as simple as possible so you can easily make changes.

Never enter into a website development course unless you already understand the basics. The vast majority of people in these courses are already far ahead of you, thus the material being taught is strictly technical. There is no buffer period. You'll go from 0 to 60 instantly and will be left behind if you enter as a complete novice.

Try to minimize your image usage. Generally, simpler designs are more effective for the user. So keep your site simple, but also neat. Avoid cluttering pages with large, bulky images that have long loading times. Try being creative with the layout and using your "eye."For example, use eye-catching focal points to get a viewer to visit something specific.

If you have ideas for multiple websites, it's a good move to go ahead and reserve a domain name now. Be creative and pick out something that you want, but make sure you reserve it now so that you can still have it later on down the road. You'd be surprised at just how many people have the same ideas. It's like we're all connected or something.

Make sure your site has a tagline. When a visitor clicks onto your site, you only have a little bit of time to hook them with your mission, purpose, and theme. A tagline should be short, clear, and explain what your site is about so that a visitor will be intrigued and remain on your site.

When designing your website, use contrasting colors and keep it simple. Do not use dark text and a darker background. This is hard on the eyes and makes the page difficult to read. Do not use complex patterns as a background, either. If you are not careful, the text will mix in with the pattern. It might be best to keep it simple: black text and a white background.

When designing a website for a mobile application, it's important that you pick the right screen resolution. From an Android to an iPad, the sites are going to be displayed on the devices differently. If you're hoping for the best results, go with a screen resolution that looks good on any type of screen.

Now that you have digested this great information, hopefully you have discovered something new about web design. This is just one article out of many possible ones, but the importance of web design has hopefully been stressed adequately in this one.

So now that you know what it takes to become a great web designer you should feel a lot more confident with handling any website. Whether it is a site that you want to work on for yourself or for business related matter you know what it takes to design websites to become successful and reach your goals.




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