Whether for personal or business reasons, many people have a website these days. But, the most common problem they face is coming up with an eye-catching design for their website. With some helpful advice, like what you are about to read, a site can look better than ever imagined.
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.
For multimedia presentations, take advantage of the new HTML5 standard. Although HTML5 isn’t quite as robust for animation and games as Flash, it has the advantage of working stably on mobile phone browsers, including those contained in Apple hardware. HTML5 is also quite a bit leaner than Flash, so load times will improve, as well.
Make sure that you prune content that is no longer relevant. If there is content on your page highlighting an event that is already part of past history, your readers are going to abandon you quickly. It is an expectation from users that you maintain the site and keep your information fresh, or else they think your site is ill-kept or abandoned. Review your website often, to remove anything which isn’t updated with the latest content.
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.
Research your subject thoroughly. If you’re going to have a blog site or something similar, you have to be sure things are done to learn about that subject before posting anything. You won’t win any followers by giving them bad information. To have a good blog, knowing about the subject is crucial.
To help you design a website that is free of clutter, do not include any scrolling text on your site. Websites that have things constantly moving back and forth on the screen is really distracting to the visitor. Not only is this distracting and annoying, it screams unprofessional and will cause your visitors to leave quickly.
Use custom error pages to make your site more informative. For instance, if you want people to report dead links on your site, either put a server-side script on your 404 page or have a form or email address that visitors can use to report the error. You should have custom pages for 403, 404, and 500 errors, at the very least.
Creating a site map is a very important part of the web design process. A site map is an effective way to inform visitors of the various kinds of content that your website has to offer, and is a great tool for navigating your website. Search engine crawlers will also utilize your site map for similar reasons, and therefore, including a site map will help boost your search rankings. Make sure your website has a site map, and that it is through.
As stated in the beginning of this article, it is common for a person to have a webpage, be it for business or pleasure. In order for their design to look great, they have to know what they are doing. Now that you have read the above article, you will have no problem with designing the website of your dreams!