If you have minimal experience in taking care of a website, doing so might seem rather scary and fun all at the same time. This article offers a variety of practical and relevant guidelines that can help you to develop an understanding of web design fundamentals. The best web sites communicate a lot of information in a small amount of words. If you are long-winded, people will easily get bored and find another site that is more concise. Make sure any content is relevant and easy to understand.
Choosing a Website Hosting Firm Choosing a web host isn’t hard, though sifting through the good and not-so-good options can be a head-twisting experience – especially if you’re taking the plunge and building a web site or blog for the first time.
The website hosting provider that your company uses should have the following credentials:
- Experience in the web hosting field
- 24/7 customer care and technical support
- Content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal
- A generous number of databases allowed with your web hosting account
- A reputable host has multiple layers of security so ask about security redundancy. Your host’s rep will be proud to explain, assuming you are talking to a quality hosting company.
- Domain name registration services and tools that give you the ability to easily manage your domain name. Don’t look for the cheapest domain registrar. You usually get what you pay for. Register your domain name with the hosting company that will rent you that disk space each month. Simplifies life on the web.
- A website that is professionally designed, filled with generous content that is useful for their clientele, and a site that portrays the social agenda that fits your company’s goals. The web site identifies the hosts “brand” – it’s corporate culture. Some use funny logos and radical type fonts, targeting a “younger” demographic. Other hosts have a more professional appearance and take the time to explain it’s corporate values, i.e. commitment to client satisfaction, tech support, fair prices and good value. If you’re serious about your web site, go with a host that is serious about hosting.
- Green hosting for your website. Green hosting isn’t some passing fad or some 60s hippie thing. It’s the future of hosting. It has to be. So, look for a host that employs wind power to generate the juice to run the servers to host the web site – yours.
- A complete website toolbox-free. Starting a web business shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. It should be available to anyone with the imagination to envision success on the web – and that’s millions of us all around the globe.
- A good, on-line partner, your web host, should provide virtually all of the tools you need to launch a web site and build it to profitability or some other measure of success.
- Instant account activation. Look for a web host that is ready on their feet. Look for a web host that is professional, secure, and ready to serve you.
Web Design Tips for Business
- An excellent tip which will assist web designers in creating their own site, is discovering an excellent selection of checklists and cheat sheets that you can go back to when you encounter any problems on your site. This will also provide you with inspiration on how to make your site better.
- Always utilize media and content that is both relative to your site’s goal, but also interesting to the potential consumers who will be viewing your site. A site that has relative info, but that is not interesting, won’t captivate its audience. A website that uses fun, but non-relative information, will captivate the wrong audience. Both methods equal profits that you are losing.
- When you are choosing a website hosting service, you want to see exactly what is included in their offer. Pay close attention to how much bandwidth, CPU usage and disk space each package includes. Be sure that you understanding what is included.
- To help your website function the way it is intended to, make sure all your links are working. If you have broken links then your visitors may get frustrated when they try to click on something that interests them. Frustrated visitors is not something you want because they end up leaving your site mad.
- If you are cultivating your web design skills with an eye towards designing many sites at a professional level, it behooves you to learn how to use multiple platforms. PHP, MySQL, and Java will all come in handy in the future if you get into web design. You need to develop multiple talents if you’re going to be a successful web designer.
- It may seem pretty simple, but the logo that you put on your website is going to make a big difference in the overall performance of your site. You must be sure that it expresses what you do, and what sets you apart from your competitors. If you cannot come up with a good logo on your own, seek help from a professional.
- 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. As a starting point, try to design two or three basic pages that only contain text, and then work your way upwards from there.
- Use ALT tags whenever possible. These helpful tags describe an image to a viewer, assisting the visually impaired, as well as those who prefer to browse without images. As an added bonus, some search engines include these tags in their rankings, so you may get a boost by using them.
- You may notice interesting web design techniques being used by other web designers, but you want to innovate, not copy. Create original features that can’t be found elsewhere and are better than those your competition provides. Your web design work will be more effective and more memorable if you remember to keep it creative.
- To save money, use free stock images when designing your website. These images can be found throughout the internet and are often as high-quality as those you have to pay for. By saving money on the images you use, you can spend that money on other aspects of design and business.
- Use sound sparingly when creating your website. Don’t aggravate users by forcing them to listen to noise that they are unable to control. It’s OK to provide links to video or audio clips, but be sure it’s the user’s choice as to whether they hear it or not.
- Write content for your page with literacy levels in mind. Not everyone viewing your page will have graduated Harvard with a medical degree and some may have not even learned to read longer than a year or two ago. If you wish to expand your audience, you must first produce content that they can comprehend.
- Be aware of your background. Some sites use moving GIFs in the background, but that can make text hard to read. Choose a background that accentuates what your site already has to offer, rather than works against it. This will help get your message across to your visitors.
- Don’t load rich content automatically. Rich content mainly refers to music and videos, but anything other than text or graphics qualifies. Many people browse in work environments where sounds suddenly playing is a big problem. Also, many people find such rich content annoying in general. Rich content should require some interaction from the user before playing.
- Implement a search tool on your site pages that allows people to search the entire site. If you do this, visitors will perceive that your site is more user-friendly; it becomes instantly easier to locate the targeted information. Site searches are easy to implement; the result will be worth the effort.
Get Feedback on your Website Get feedback on your web design. A web designer is only one person, and what you might find attractive or useful, might be considered by others to be irrelevant and hard to navigate. If possible, get some members of your target market to test your site and give you feedback on what they like and what they don’t.
Promote your Company and your Product with a Good Website Look at web design as a fun, exciting way for you to reach out to your target group and promote both your company and your product. When done correctly, a good website is a great add-on to give you the ammunition needed to promote your business. Use these guidelines as soon as possible, and you will notice remarkable improvements.
