Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The Best Tips For Designing Your Site Like A Pro

By Daniel Will


Do you wish to become a great web designer? Are there many goals on your plate, but your lack of knowledge in web design is keeping you from them? The following article can teach you the things you should know to become a better web designer.

In order to evaluate your web design skills accurately, it's a good idea to start off with small, simple websites where your successes and shortcomings will be easy to spot. Besides keeping them small, your initial efforts should also be simple. Avoid complex multimedia and advanced structures to begin with, and stick with basic pages of text and pictures.

It is important to keep all links on your website up-to-date and working. Proper web designing entails having working links, so users do not get annoyed. Examine the links periodically to check their functionality.

Allow your visitors to contact you through email, a contact form, comments or social media. This will give you a mechanism where your visitors can let you know if something is broken, doesn't work as well as it should or is confusing. Giving your visitors a voice makes them much more likely to return to your site and continue the conversation.

Throughout the design process, you should perform useability tests periodically. Every time you make a change, a neutral viewer should give you their opinion. It might not matter to you if a product demonstration takes 10 seconds to load, but your visitors might think differently. Use the wisdom of others who are outside your immediate circle to get an opinion.

Draw a few sketches of possible looks for your website. You can receive some idea of the way people will react to these sketches by asking your loved ones their opinions on your drafts. By doing this, you can develop some conclusions on which direction your site should be heading in.

Resist any temptation to use pop-up windows when you design your website. While you might see these as valuable in some form or another, most people find them rather annoying. If customers see these popups and get frustrated, they may not come back to your site.

Include some form of "site searching" from your home page, and all sub-pages if possible. This increases the site's usability five-fold, and makes it easier to get to anyplace on the site from any other place on the site. Site searches are easy to implement; the result will be worth the effort.

Promoting good web design practices will give you a ton of benefits. Your site will look even better, be more user-friendly, and build trust with your users. Whether or not your website succeeds or fails is based on your design. The above article has given you useful web design advice. Use those that will help you make a successful website!




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