When a designer has experience, the design of a website can be stunning. Effective web designs can help you distinguish successful designs from mediocre ones. Education is crucial to successful web design. Try increasing your knowledge base with the following tips and advice, and you should see an immediate improvement in your ability to design well.
It is always good to add a favicon to your website. The favicon is a 16×16 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.
Don’t neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user’s local cache thereafter.
Minimize your page sizes. If your site takes awhile to load, your visitors will lose interest. You don’t want people to have to abandon your site because the pages won’t load.
Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.
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.
Utilize newsletters if you want repeat visitors. Letting customers subscribe to updates and new information can keep them coming back. Put the form for signing up in a prominent location, such as a sidebar, and use it to compile a list of visitors who opt in to your newsletter. Only send out a newsletter to people who have subscribed to it, otherwise you will have angry customers.
Personalize your site. Your clients want to feel comfortable with you, so use testimonials from trusted customers, as well as photographs of people. Building trust with your customers is very important, so be sure to let them know you personally care about the product or service you are providing them.
Unique, interesting, and professional web design can really shape a website into something that is great. It’s simple to see the difference between good and bad design, but the real trick is learning to avoid bad design completely. Use the advice from this article to create the perfect design for your website.