An Approach To Designing A Good Website
Web design is not necessarily the exclusive province of professionals. Many people manage to design a good website themselves, with a little help from templates, good advice and online software. Web hosting sites offer easy to use templates. If your site is not complex, you may just need to select from the fonts, page layouts, and colors that are offered, add your own pictures, and be ready to publish. If you feel you do not need to hire a professional web designer, here are some tips to help you set up your own site.
First you need to choose a domain name. It should accurately indicate what your site is about. A clever phrase, or a keyword that is popular, but not relevant can be counter-productive. You want visitors to clearly understand what you are really offering.
Any web hosting site will provide the free service of checking out a domain name you want to find out if it is available. If you decide on a domain name, you may want to buy the similar names that are not taken, just to avoid having them used by competitors.
Software products like Dreamweaver and Adobe Creative Cloud have a lot to offer if you are doing a specialized or advanced site, but there are also free offerings like WordPress that may be entirely adequate.
In the beginning, make sure your site can be accessed by all the major browsers. Just because it works in one does not mean it will work in others. It is a good idea to include your distinctive logo in your URL.
To avoid losing visitors because they have failed to enter www before your URL, provide for re-direction to your site in this case. Also, create a 404 page that corrects a mistyped URL and brings the visitor to your page regardless, rather than to a "page not found" error that may turn a visitor away permanently.
Make your home page one of beautiful simplicity. A nice image helps. Use white space to enhance content. White space is not just an empty space waiting to be filled. It emphasizes the importance of the content it surrounds. Within five seconds, the visitor should have a clear idea of what your website is about. Leave the elaborate details to later pages. Another reason to keep your home page simple is that a complex page with a lot of graphics and pixels will take a long time to download. Many visitors won't wait.
To improve SEO, include keywords in file names. Also, if you need to separate words in your website's name to make them more readable, it is better to use hyphens than underscores since they tend to be viewed more favorably by the search engines. However, most people have gotten used to reading long URLs with words run together by now, so it is not as necessary as it might once have been to separate the words.
These tips can get you started in designing your own website. It is an exciting adventure that can also be rewarding financially.
