Sliced - Web Design Tips: How to Make Your Website Fruitful - Sliced Web Design

This is the result of running the Acid3 test o...

The result of running the Acid3 test on FireFox 3.5

If your about to design your website but don't know where to begin. First of all, you will need to plan your site. There's a quite a lengthy list of design aspects you will need to think about before you start your project. These vary from aspects, such as layout and navigation. All of which are integral to making your site beautiful to look at, as well as user friendly.

Tip 1: The layout needs to be inviting, interesting, but not cluttered. Keeping it relatively simple looking will attract people to what the website actually says, whilst, a cluttered website will detract attention from the content. Most web designers will use a simple Dreamweaver template in order to create an effective but basic site. To use Dreamweaver, you do not even have to use code to create a website, making it user friendly to all those beginner web designers out there.

When considering layout, think over what font and size you want to use. Choosing a font that is too fancy, might mean viewers cannot always properly view your site, so try to keep to the regular fonts, such as Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana.

You will also need to consider the gaps between the text. A large gap may make the page look too spaced out, whilst, a small gap can create an overly cramped look. A bad layout can put a viewer right off, as it looks unprofessional and difficult to use.

Tip 2: CSS styles are at the forefront of web design. Since designers have moved away from the old fashioned mode of design (tables), they have looked towards the CSS style, which gives greater control over the design elements, as well as reduces file sizes. It allows you to have more control over the text, use bullet points, as well as create links without that unsophisticated underlining.

Tip 3: The navigation links are a key way to keeping people stay on your site.An excellent navigation system needs to be easy to use and neat looking, as well as appropriate for your audience. Not only must the first page keep their interest after all, but so should the navigation links. It's vital that you use interesting but specific language to navigate users to your other pages.

Tip 4: You don't want your viewers to navigate to another site simply because your site took too long to upload. To keep your site uploading time as fast as possible, don't overload you pages with graphics and keep the HTML tags as precise as possible. The biggest cause of slow loading times is sites having too many unnecessary HTML tags.

Tip 5: When planning your website's design, it's integral that you consider other variables that may affect the look of the page. For instance, screen resolution can have a dramatic effect upon the page's look, that's why most web designers design stretched out versions of each page. If you decide to not use stretched out versions, it may be that in consequence people may get put off by a distorted looking page.

As a multitude of screen sizes and designs are now on the market, we can't tailor our sites to them all, however, redesigning sites so that the code and layout is scalable is the only way of tailoring the websites as precisely as possible to the size of the viewer's PC screen.

Other problems that web users come across include, unprofessional or newbie web designers creating websites that are not compatible with some web browsers. After all, Internet Explorer is not the only web browser these days. Most viewers now opt for the quicker and less space consuming, Mozilla Firefox or Safari, which both do not have as many problems with internet viruses. Your website, for optimum viewing capacity, will need to be compatible with the latest versions of the main web browsers on the I.T market.