Six Important Tips to Keep in Mind When Designing Your New Website

Okay, so you have decided to build your own website and you have decided to do it yourself, your own way, without having to pay a professional web designer. Although buying a ready-made template to customize it according to your needs or hiring a web designer seems like the easy way to go, there are certain advantages if you decide to build your site yourself. The most obvious of these is that you will be totally familiar with the ins and outs of the design process and able to modify it according to your requirements as and when needed. However, the first thing you will obviously need to design a professional looking website is creativity. You need to be as creative as possible. Along with this, you must be well aware of certain considerations as well as most common mistakes you need to avoid in order to design a successful website. In this article, you will go through three of the most common mistakes designers make when developing a new website, as well as three other important tips for creating a professional looking and successful site.

Poor navigation is one of the most common blunders committed by web designers, so the importance to avoid it cannot be over emphasized. Be sure to develop an optimal layout for your site navigation, and find out the most natural and hasslefree way to access relevant information through the menus. You may need to decide on the best position of the menus, for example horizontal or vertical, as well as their actual location on your website. To get an idea about some of the most common and efficient layouts used by authority websites, you can conduct a search on the Internet in order to stay on top of things. Another most important aspect of effective site navigation is to determine the optimal number of images and links to be used. The use of plenty of links or images can frustrate your site visitors, with the result that they don't know which links should be clicked.

Another major mistake when designing a new site is the use of heavy graphics or images that consume plenty of bandwidth. As you may already know, bandwidth is probably not the cheapest commodity when buying cheap web hosting. Although there are many cheap hosting providers that offer unlimited bandwidth, there are almost always some strings attached to it which you would know if you carefully read their terms of service. So you need to make sure that the usage of images or other graphics on your site is such that it does not exceed the total bandwidth quota supported by your web host. Another negative aspect of this overuse of bandwidth can be the slow experience of your website to your visitors. This is because you never know the speed at which a visitor is browsing the Internet, which means that dial-up or even low-speed broadband users are sure to be frustrated by the slow loading speed of your site. This can prove to be the most lethal thing for your online business since long waiting times can turn away a great majority of your site visitors.

The third important thing that you must keep in your mind is to avoid complexity as much as you can. Similar to the scenario you can encounter in the case of using heavy graphics, the use of flash on your website can also prove to be against the principles of a user-friendly site. So if you can avoid the use of flash without affecting your website's image, it is highly advisable to stay away from it. Secondly, flash becomes a major problem when it comes to ease of access by the search engine spiders. Some search engine bots are inherently incapable of accessing flash content, which means that you will not be able to get it indexed by them. Finally, not all browsers are able to support flash content, which means that a certain percentage of your visitors might not be able to see it without downloading and installing a separate plug-in into their browser. However, if you think that the use of flash is absolutely inevitable for you, then be sure to use some content that can complement the contents of your flash media.

Let us turn your attention now to the three most important tips you need to consider in order to design a great-looking and successful website. The foremost consideration is the design of a great-looking logo for your new site. This is the most crucial element of your site design and is the single major factor that leaves a first-hand impact of your online business on the first time visitors to your site. Here, you basically have three routes to follow. You can use the clipart provided in the Microsoft Office Word to create the new logo, and afterwards you can color it with the color of your choice using a variety of picture editing software. The most popular of these picture editing software and the one we recommend is Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, which lets you edit an image easily and professionally. The second route you might take is by purchasing professional logo designing software. You can search for the term "logo design software" in the Google search engine which will list a multitude of software you can use for designing your new logo. The third option is to use the services of a professional logo design firm such as logoyes.com, logodesignguru.com etc. You can find a number of such companies by searching for the term "logo design" in Google.

The second important consideration pertains to the optimal number of pages your site may contain. As you might already be aware, content is king when it comes to establishing the authority of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. The more content you add to your website, the greater the probability that it will be treated as an authority resource by the major search engines and ranked accordingly. However, it is important to bear in mind that the addition of new content should never be directly proportional to the number of new pages you create for your site. For reasons of navigation and to avoid clutter, it is important that you add a new page for newly added content only if it justifies the addition of a new page. If the newly created content can complement existing content and can be accommodated on that page, there is no need to create a separate page for that content. There must be a purpose which should be served, not merely the addition of new pages to make your site look like an authority one.

Finally, internal linking is one of the most important aspects to be considered when designing a user-friendly website. What should be stressed is the addition of links naturally wherever possible within the site structure. Optimal internal linking can greatly help your site's visitors in that they will be able to find and locate relevant content without any difficulty. This is sure to boost their experience of your website and enhance your recognition as an expert within the field. Internal linking is also important for another reason, which is the effective use of search engine optimization techniques to enhance your visibility in the major search engines. The search engine bots are always in the lookout for good links placed appropriately within relevant content. Here, it is important to avoid the usage of phrases and terms which are not related to the content, such as "click here" etc. It is always advisable to use your targeted keywords and phrases when linking internally from one content to another on your site.

As a new web designer, it is highly advisable that you keep in your mind the above mentioned not-to-dos as well as to-dos. Taking into account these important considerations will help you will design a professionally looking website that is also optimized from SEO point of view. We recommend that you use some professional web designing software such as Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 to get your hands on your designing task. As your experience with the design process increases over the course of time, you are also likely to enhance and brush your skills.

About the Article

This is a genuine article custom written for WHL (WebHostLead.com). WHL is an unbiased directory of web host reviews based on visitor's comments as well as webmaster reviews about the best web hosting providers.

Note: WHL holds all copyrights to this article. If you would like to publish the article on your website, you must include the "About the Article" section as well.

• Next >