Make Your Web Design Easier With These Techniques

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Make Your Web Design Easier With These Techniques
Learning how to become successful in web design can seem overwhelming at times. Yet if you read through you can learn some insightful information on how to become a success in web design so you can concentrate on reaching your future endeavors.

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.

When you are designing a website, it is important to have proper spelling and grammar. In addition to running spell-check on your content, ask a friend or co-worker to proofread everything. Having good spelling and grammar on your website will help give it a professional feel and your visitor will be more likely to return.

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.

Separate your topics. If you have several topics of discussion on your site, put them on different pages. This helps alleviate any confusion that your customers may experience, as well as giving search engines a broader and more clear view of your site, potentially bumping you up higher in their rankings.

Remember to utilize ALT tags for images as you design your website. These tags provide several very important functions in that they describe images for people who browse the Internet with graphics disabled, and provide descriptions for people who are visually impaired and utilize tools that translate images to voice. If your images are used as links, ALT tags also provide a way for you to describe the behavior of the link. Finally, ALT tags are used by search engine crawlers, and therefore using them can help boost your search rank.

Every website designer needs a good platform to test their work out on, and XAMPP is probably the best out there. XAMPP will allow you to run your test sites with PHP and mySQL, so you will always be able to spot anything that needs to be changed. XAMPP is a relatively light download and it's also easy to figure out.

Always utilize media and content that is both relative to your site's goal, but also interesting to the potential consumers who will be viewing your site. A site that has relative info, but that is not interesting, won't captivate its audience. A website that uses fun, but non-relative information, will captivate the wrong audience. Both methods equal profits that you are losing.

Seo

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.

So now that you know what it takes to become a great web designer you should feel a lot more confident with handling any website. Whether it is a site that you want to work on for yourself or for business related matter you know what it takes to design websites to become successful and reach your goals.