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.
Use a tracking service, rather than displaying your visitor counter for all to read. Many websites still display their counters, yet they do not serve any real purpose. There are many high quality tracking services available, and some are even free. Use these instead of showing off how many people visit you.
Use JavaScript to include a custom font on your webpages. Libraries like Typekit and Google Web Fonts make it easy to include esoteric fonts on webpages, even if most visitors don't have those fonts on their computers. It works by embedding the font itself into JavaScript so that it can be decoded by the client on the fly.
There are plenty of free and paid tools that exist to help you create a stunning website. They are easy to understand, and your website will be up and ready before you know it. It doesn't matter how good your content is if your site is dated and unusable.
Ensure that your website can pass the NoScript test. Download this extension in Firefox and see how your site looks. Some stuff won't work unless there are scripts.
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.
If you want your site to reach search engines, ditch frames. While frames look nice, they do not help when it comes to search engines. You will lose viewers if they can't find your site because a search engine fails to find what they searched for on your page. When there is a low rating, there is little traffic.
Always use the same type of fonts so that guest to your site don't become agitated by reading different types of fonts. You want people to browse through the site with ease so that they can just concentrate on the material on the site and what the site has to offer.
It is important to make use of ALT tags for your images in your site design. ALT tags are used to provide a description of the images on your site, which will help any visually impaired visitors. If part of a link, you can include information about the link intention. The ALT tags will bring up the search rank of your site because search engine crawlers use them as well.
Controls for the user's interface are important, but don't design them so that they are visually appealing, yet misleading towards their actual function. Make certain that each clickable option is clearly understandable from the text or image it presents. If the option is not yet implemented properly, don't allow it to be seen by average viewers.
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When you do progress through your stages of website design and have a site that is up and running you want to make sure that it isn't cluttered with ads. People don't mind ads but they hate it when there are a lot that make it difficult to navigate through your site, and you don't want people mad.
Try your best to update the content of any old sites that you have. You want to make sure that any of the sites you build seem like they're up to date with the technology that is out today - you don't want a site that looks 10 years old.
Focusing on your target audience is important even for website design. For instance, if you're designing a site in order to sell winter coats, you're not exactly going to have a beach themed background with Joe Strummer tunes playing upon entry. Keep your site closely related to its targeted audience.
Do you now better understand the complexities of web page design? Make sure you are able to apply what you learned here and keep searching for new ideas so you can succeed at all of your future web page design goals.