Web Design Made Easy In A Few Steps




in Web Design    (submitted 2012-08-17)










If you desire feedback from your visitors, design your site to include a feedback form rather than a guestbook. A feedback form lets your site visitors contact you without having anything negative be shown to everyone else who sees your site. If you have a guestbook then everyone can read both good and bad comments, something you really do not want people to see, especially when the comments are negative.

When you do progress through your stages of web design and have a site that is up and running you want to make sure that it isn’t cluttered with ads. People don’t mind ads but they hate it when there are a lot that make it difficult to navigate through your site, and you don’t want people mad.

Make sure that the site is compatible with different browsers. You must test your site on both Internet Explorer and Netscape to be sure that your content can be viewed by visitors that are using either browser. Do not just check that it works on one and launch the site.

You must be sure to check for any broken links prior to uploading your page to your server. You can use Dreamweaver to check this out quite easily with just a click of a button. If you upload your site without checking the links first, it will seriously irritate your visitors if they come across broken links as they are trying to maneuver through your site.

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 mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. These files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer if the user does not have it.

Any good web design must include the proper planning as you are getting started. This planning process includes selecting a domain and a hosting package as well as planning out the information layout and designs. Planning is essential to web design, as it gets you ready beforehand to carry out your idea of the website.

As you have seen, designing a high quality web page does not have to be as difficult as you may fear. Once you know what you are doing, you can put together a website that runs smoothly and does not distract from your content. Just remember what you learned in this article.

About the Author

More and more of our lives take place online these days, so web pages that do not work well are not going to receive much positive attention. If you need to learn more about designing an effective web page that will get people coming back again and again to your website, this article is for you.