Increase Your Design Savvy With These Tips For Creating Great Websites

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Increase Your Design Savvy With These Tips For Creating Great Websites
There are many purposes behind a good website. It can serve as a hub for information, a platform for social networking, or a portal for entertainment. A webmaster helps with the design of a website. Create a great site with these tips.

Avoid using so-called "mystery meat navigation". This involves using unlabeled images or other elements for the site's navigation. In many cases, the visitor has to mouse over the buttons to even see what they do. Navigation is best kept simple. Use text links across the top or along the left side of the page.

Make sure your webpages aren't too long. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and if your most important content is "below the fold," it may not even be read. If you have a lot of related content that needs to stay together, consider breaking it up into sections and adding links to each section.

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.

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.

Always ensure you are giving meaningful feedback, as this is what creates the communication between a website and its visitors. For example, if an action taken by a visitor results in an error, do not simply display "error occurred."� Instead, provide a message that explains what happened and how the visitor can correct the error by taking a different action. Without this feedback, visitors are more likely to grow frustrated and just give up by leaving your website.

Learn about shortcuts, and use them often. Almost everything has a shortcut in web design, and if you take the time to look them over, you'll find quick ways to do almost everything. There are even HTML codes that allow you to make fast changes to each of your pages without having to re-upload them.

There are a lot of web design programs available for sale, and they can help you create a great website. Many of these programs are easy to use and you can build a great website rather quickly. If your website looks sloppy and unappealing, there will be many visitors who don't bother coming back.

To help your website visitors find their way home on your site, always include a link to your homepage on each page of your site. Having a home page link that is visible allows your reader to easily make their way back to starting point. If you do not have a home page link then your visitors might get frustrated and leave your site altogether.

Whilst development platforms can be helpful as they create your web code for you, some of them can be very unreliable, and you may actually find using a generic text editor is a better option. Utilizing a platform allows you to focus on the design aspects of the website, while having the platform handle the technical aspect of creating the code. But if you desire a true creator experience and want to reduce errors, stick with classic text editors.

Do your best to stay consistent with your efforts when you are learning web design. You don't want to learn a couple of things then come back a couple of weeks later and try to learn something new and already have forgotten the information that you had previously learned complicating your whole web design process.

As this article told you before, you can use a website for a lot, such as informing people or entertained. Having web design is crucial for all sites. Use the tips you read above to fine tune your skills in designing.