Want To Become A Web Design Expert? Read This Piece

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Want To Become A Web Design Expert? Read This Piece
You probably want to create your own website. In this day and age, most people have wanted to create their own website at some point. Many people have an idea of what they want their site to be like, but aren't sure how to create one. If this sounds like you, then you will want to pay close attention to the web design tips in this article.

Keep the size of your web pages small. A lot of modern web pages are full of unnecessary elements, including huge images, Flash advertising, and lots of AJAX. Many people, especially those in rural areas and other countries with less-developed internet infrastructure, don't have high-speed Internet and will have to wait forever for a large page to load.

Don't try to fit too much onto one page when you're designing a website. If your page is too busy it will take a lot longer to load and can overwhelm visitors. When you're going to be putting up a lot of content, create pages for everything you can to reduce the clutter on your page.

Don't disable the visitor's right-click functionality. Some sites do this in order to prevent people from copying and pasting text or saving images from the site. The thing is, it doesn't work and disables other useful functions. OCR can be used to capture text from such sites, and grabbing images is as simple as taking a screenshot.

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.

To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages.

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.

For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. Not only is this good for search engine optimization, but it is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible.

Get in the habit of testing early and often. Running usability and user interaction tests early in the game can really save you frustration in the long run. You never want to stop testing the website and trying to make it better.

Pages of a website are very important for even the smallest sites, so make sure that you really have an eye for detail. You need to make sure that the latest page you have added to your site has the same dimensions and features of your previous pages. The last thing you want is a hodgepodge of different styles and themes on one site.

As stated before, just about everyone, including you, has wanted to create a website. People have had ideas on what their website will be like for years, but become stuck in the actual creation process. This hurdle can be easily jumped from using the web design tips mentioned in the article above.