Though this next piece of advice may seem obvious, it is important. Refrain from posting a page on the public Internet without proofreading it for spelling and grammar. If your page has errors or does not read well, you will not look like the professional that you are. When you look unprofessional you can lose a lot of visitors from
coming back to your site.
Basic design tools will get you started on your website, but you will want to add some custom options. It is ideal that you add an element of uniqueness and personality to your website. This will mean that you need come up with new design elements that are not obtainable by using the provided options of the host’s
Make sure you work on your design every day for a few hours. While working on bits and pieces in brief spates can be productive, to accomplish real goals you’ll have to invest some real hours. Working hard creates focus, which means that you will create a better site and therefore improve your profit margin.
Use Photoshop to create attractive websites if you are a beginner. Even without professional training, a web designer with a good grasp of Photoshop can turn out attractive, useful websites very quickly. When you are working without something similar to Photoshop, it will create a steeper learning curve for design, and increase the time it takes to reach your goals.
Draw some simple illustrations of how you’d like your website to look. Show your family and friends your sketches to get their feedback, so you can get a sense of others’ opinions of your site.
Don’t use
for a website, as you could lose clients. It may be tempting because of the price, but you may be allowing the host to put advertisements on your site that you cannot control and are potentially offensive to your customers. You will risk losing customers, and will give the impression of being an amateur.
A great tool for web designers who are in the early stages of building their website is to make use of concept sketches. Using this will help you determine what you need for your site and how it should look. It’s a great starting point.
Let your users have the option of canceling any action if they wish to do so. Types of such actions would include registering an email, filling out forms, or browsing your site for archives or topics. If you do not give your users the option to cancel something, then you are making them do something, which can cause users to be leery of making future purchases or coming back to your website at all.
When a user enters personal information into a form on your website, give the user the option to have the server retain that information should it be needed again. If users register on your site, some of their data should be saved. This makes it easier to fill out forms, and is considered to be very convenient. Creating transferable form information will make the overall process simpler and quicker for your visitors, and they will be happy with the time you have saved them.
You must always include the capability to search if you are working on a large website. The best place to put your search text box is in the top right hand corner as that is where the bulk of websites put theirs. You can find search functions to use for your site on sites like Google.
We hope this article has taken the mystery out of website design. Learning more about web design will help you create a website that lives up to your expectations. Start with applying the advice you read and you should be able to design a good first website.
