Building Your Own Website? Employ These Tips For Success!

The idea of building a website from the ground up is exciting, but it is also intimidating! It can be hard to decide where or how to begin or who you should get advice from. The tips in this article should help you figure out your basic planning so you can get started on the right foot.

HTML5 video is set to become the next standard for displaying videos on the web and naturally, you should offer both a way in which users can stream your content through an HTML5 format as well as another format such as flash for those who have an older browser version.

You should always be on the lookout for new information from various forums that can help you learn how to start out or gain more knowledge with web design. You can just do a quick google search and find the information that you want to learn right on the web for free.

Test your site to see if the major translation services work properly when translating your site. Some sites receive many international visitors, and these visitors sometimes use services like BabelFish and Google Translate to translate the text to their language. Certain web design problems, especially poor server side code, can break these services.

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.

If you want your site visitors to spend as much time as possible on your site, make text easy to read. One of the most common design mistakes is using graphic backgrounds with patterns or dark colors; combine this with equally dark text and you have a recipe for disaster. Unless the text is clear and easy to read, your site will not be a success.

Always give your readers the ability to stop whatever it is they're doing. This includes completing forms, enrolling in email newsletters and searching the site to find certain information. If you do not give visitors the option to get out of an action they do not want to continue with, you are pressuring them into something. This makes them less likely to come back or buy from you in the future.

To help you design a site that is easy for people to read all the information, make sure the pages are not too wide. If the pages are not too wide then they will fit on most people's computer screens. If the page is too wide, then part of your valuable information could be left off the page.

Learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Although there are many templates that allow you to just fill in the blanks, in order to create a web page, these templates provide only limited design possibilities. Understanding how the mark-up language and stylesheet work together will enable you to customize your website to your heart's content.

Do not use images for your background. When you think about some of the biggest websites on the Internet, they do not have images as backgrounds. When you use image backgrounds, you represent yourself as someone who is not well-versed in web designing. Images as backgrounds also cause your site to load slower, which can lead to user frustration.

Use breadcrumbs and make it so that clicking on the site logo returns you to the homepage. Breadcrumbs are markers that show where the visitor is in the site structure. For instance, the breadcrumbs might read "home > furniture > beds." When the user clicks a link in the breadcrumbs, he can return to a page further up in the site hierarchy. Clicking on a business logo should generally take the visitor back to the homepage as well.

Now that you have digested this great information, hopefully you have discovered something new about web design. This is just one article out of many possible ones, but the importance of web design has hopefully been stressed adequately in this one.

There is quite a bit of information that deals with web design and you need to get a good balance of knowledge to succeed.

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