When you are creating graphics or photos for your website, be sure to keep the file size small. If your graphics are too large, your page will load slowly and your visitors will leave. You can find many free or inexpensive graphics programs online that will optimize your images before you load them to your website.
Always give viewers the option to cancel a current action. For example, put a "clear" button on a form, an unsubscribe link on all newsletters and a "cancel" button on orders. Not allowing customers to cancel actions that they do not want to follow through with is unfair, and it is forceful, which may prevent those visitors from returning to your site or making purchases from you in the future.
To help you design a more professional looking site, do not include an image in the page background. A background image screams low quality site, plus these site usually take forever to load. When you are going for a more professional look, the last thing you want is your visitors waiting forever because images are still loading on your pages.
Learn the basics of HTML and CSS. Although there are many templates that allow you to just fill in the blanks, in order to create a web page, these templates provide only limited design possibilities. Understanding how the mark-up language and stylesheet work together will enable you to customize your website to your heart's content.
Use shortcuts. In website development, there are lots of shortcuts that will decrease the amount of time it takes to do things. There are lots of HTML codes that can help you make changes quickly without going through the upload process.
For your image tags, always try to include a brief description in the ALT attribute. Not only is this good for search engine optimization, but it is also beneficial to the sight-impaired users who rely on screen readers to describe image tag contents. Make your description short and as descriptive as possible.
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 the websites you're designing are cross-browser compatible. You must check your site in the most popular versions of every top browser. Some examples include Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Many users use these browsers for surfing online, so you need to be sure your designs are being seen correctly on whatever they use.
If you have questions about popular site design software like Photoshop or Dreamweaver, you may wish to speak with an experienced friend or coworker. Knowing as much as possible about every facet of website creation is key to giving yourself the ability to design great websites.
Learn as much as you can about the various forms of html, as the html is crucial to website development. When you learn about html go ahead and make a couple of pages that are sort of filled with the information that you want to add to any of the sites you plan on working on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5NBaphKJbs
