Improve Your Web Design Skills With These Tips

By Tommy Stetke


A good way to learn how to make money, potentially whenever you want, is through web design. When you learn how to make websites, you can either make them for other people or for yourself. The time you dedicate to working on these sites can be all on your own time, which is great if you want to be free while you make money.

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.

If you want your site visitors to spend as much time as possible on your site, make text easy to read.

Before you publish any web page, check it carefully for broken links. Nothing is more frustrating to a visitor than clicking on a link and being taken to an error page. You can check your links manually, or there are programs that will scan your site for you and report any broken links.

Include a search element that allows visitors to search within your website content. If those visiting your site are looking for something specific, the first thing they will look for is a search box. When you don't have one, they are more likely to move on to another site that does. Always place the box at the top right of the page, as this is the first place visitors tend to look for one. Zling Design can help you about this issue.

Test your website in the most popular browsers and platforms to make sure that it displays correctly. Sometimes scripts that work in one browser may not produce the same results in another browser. So you may need take extra measures, like adding a function for browser detection, in order to ensure that your website will display properly under most conditions.

It is important to have a solid list of references to give to potential clients if you want to be successful at web design. Many of the web designers that are on the market have a list of previous clients that they can give to potential clients to contact, to confirm that they are great designers and that they are able to live up to their claims.

Limit the amount of content you start out with on a given page to small amounts when you first start out. You don't want to add a bunch of stuff that is going to fluster you because this can make your visitors confused as well when they come visit your site.

Provide a navigation menu on every page of your site. While this menu does not have to link every single page of your site, as this could be an exhaustive list if you have a very large site, it should provide links to the main pages. This ensures that your visitors do not have to return to the home page and start completely over when it is not necessary.

Be sure your website works both with and without the "www" prefix. Some people will type this in before they head to your site as a force of habit, and some may not. You should make sure that customers will be directed to your site either way, or you may have some confused people on your hands. You can find out more about us on Zling.

It's not the 90's anymore, so stay away from using frames. Frames were of great use in the early days of web design but it had a lot of flaws. Frame designs make it harder for readers to bookmark your site and scrolling becomes a chore. There are much easier ways to provide your users a flow through your website.

Although it is common to see the www. at the front of a website URL, you should try to make sure that you can access your site whether you choose to include it or not. This will make it much easier for anyone to access regardless of how they type it.

With all that you learned throughout this article, you should now have a better idea about what you should be doing when it comes to web design. Just be sure to use all that you learned to the best of your ability and before you know it, you'll be a web design pro.




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