We get a lot of questions about web design and whether or not  it is important to have a great design for your website. Many of the questions we receive are more focused on the cosmetics of the design and how to make the design more appealing, rather than functionality and SEO.

Inevitably, the conversation always seems to turn to whether or not the owners of the website should turn to a professional website designer or can they learn to do it themselves.

DIY Web Design – Should You?

Many people want to learn to become a web designer, yet they aren’t sure if they have what it takes to become good in the subject. Anyone can be a good web designer they just have to learn how to first, the more you learn from places like this article the better you are sure to become at web design.

To get started, take some classes on web design or study books on web design to get a basic understanding. There are many how-to books for web designers that will take you through a step-by-step process for learning to do web design. Many of these books include links to free tools that you can use while learning. As you become more adept at web design you can then move up to the more powerful web design tools which will set you back a few dollars to purchase.

Website Design Basics

So now that you are designing your website. Let’s mention some of the areas we have found that make for Great Tips to use for Better Web Design.

Make sure your site has a tagline. When a visitor clicks onto your site, you only have a little bit of time to hook them with your mission, purpose, and theme. A tagline should be short, clear, and explain what your site is about so that a visitor will be intrigued and remain on your site.

Incorporate a site map into your website. Site maps serve several purposes. First, they make navigation throughout your site much easier for visitors. Second, the major search engines can utilize it to index your entire site. This means your search engine optimization improves, and your website receives more exposure, giving you more profit-earning potential. Later of you can learn to incorporate XML site maps for boosting you sites SEO results.

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 thorough and accurate for you site.

Make sure your site passes the NoScript test. Download and activate the NoScript extension which is available for Google’s Chrome and Firefox and see if your site is still readable. Some content, such as ordering systems for products, can’t work without scripts, but if your site is simply blank with scripts turned off, that’s bad news.

Use your creativity when you are designing a website. While you could simply copy the format of other successful website, you would be much better off if you found ways to improve upon them. Take the time and really find new ways to enhance the website to make it as good as it can be.

Creativity is what separates ordinary sites from the extraordinary ones, so never be afraid to get a little creative. As long as you’re staying on topic and are keeping the site functioning properly, you can get a little creative. People visiting your site want to see originality. They wouldn’t visit your site at all if they wanted the same old stuff.

When designing your website, you need to make sure that your site and its content is accessible to everyone. It helps if you can find someone out of the country to check your site for you. Some content may not be displayed the same in other countries, so this is something you may want to check if your intentions are to target an international audience with you website.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Obviously, the purpose for designing and building a website in the first place is to attract customers to your business.

In other words, you need traffic to your website which you can convert into customers for you business.

Traffic is the term used on the internet for visitors to your website. To get visitors, you need to get your site listed on the search engines, such as Google.

Think about the way you start your own search for information on the internet. You might use Google, Bing, Yahoo, or some other search engine to enter in a search term about the topic that you are searching for. These search engines then display a list of results which are relevant to your search term. The listing of websites that appear are based on how relevant they are to your search term and how well their web designers performed SEO for their websites.

So, take note… To get your websites in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) you need to…

• Make sure all of your webpages actually have titles, and make sure they are descriptive. A surprising number of webpages out there are called “untitled document” or “new document”. This not only denies visitors a useful piece of information to remember your site, but also absolutely destroys your SEO, since search engines weight page titles heavily when ranking sites.
• Use a site map on your website. A web site does two things. First, it makes your site easier for site visitors to understand. They can find what they are looking for, and they can see what you have to offer on one easy map. Secondly, a site map is great for search engine optimization, or SEO. It easier for the search engines to find and “crawl” your site.
• Include Relevant Content – Your website should have a purpose and the purpose should be to provide the content you readers are looking for. You should stay on topic with your content and never deviate from the websites main content focus.

HTML5 The New Video Standard

Video is now the new craze… You have heard the saying a picture is worth a thousand words! Well, video is worth a lot more to your website design. Don’t get me wrong you still need to have great content on your website. But, if you want to get your website ranked quickly by the search engines it seems video is the key.

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.

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.

HTML5 is something that you’re going to have to be familiar with if you want to be truly successful with web design. If you aren’t familiar with HTML5 then you’re going to have a lot of work to accomplish in the future so get your mind ready and start learning,

CSS The Paint On Your Website

Think about web design, HTML, and CSS from the analogy of an automobile…

HTML is the frame, engine, and body of the auto. While CSS is the leather seats, chrome trim, and paint that makes the automobile look so good.

CSS plays a very important roll in the success of your website design. Without it, it’s just another drab looking website. Therefore, if you want to be a better web designer then you need to learn CSS. Here are my favorite tips for CSS;

• Avoid cramming page elements together. Each section of your page should be naturally separated from each other, as this makes the purpose of each section more clear. The easiest way to separate sections is by using DIVs, but there are other ways, including absolute positioning (not recommended), the CSS margin command, and floats.
• When designing your website, create independent CSS pages for the web browsers and use conditional loading. Using these techniques makes it much easier for testing and ensuing maintenance later on. All websites need to be maintained at some point, and you want it to be as simple as possible so you can easily make changes.
• When designing your website, you should utilize cascading style sheets, or CSS. These style sheets can be applied to every webpage on your website, and will ensure that the user experience is consistent throughout the website. They are also effective for making quick design changes to your website due to the fact that you only need to change the style sheet as opposed to making alterations on every webpage.
• Don’t neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user’s local cache thereafter.

Well there you have it… My Great Tips to Use for Better Web Design.

 

 

 

Using the advice from this article you can become a good web designer in no time, and you should now feel a bit more confident and think so as well. So now that you have some insightful knowledge on the subject you can apply that towards your web design efforts and become a Great designer of websites in no time.