Tag Archives: meta tags

Richard Vanderhurst

Great Advice If You Want To Get Into Web Design

Learning the basics is the only way you’ll become successful in web design. There are numerous references that a web designer can utilize in order to begin learning. This article is a great example of such a reference. Read on to find some amazing advice!

Sounds are of questionable use on a website, so be really cautious when considering them for your own site. No visitor is going to want to be faced with uncontrollable, automatic sounds that begin playing when they load up your website. Providing links for audio and video are fine, though you need to allow the visitor to have complete control as to whether they want to listen to something on your site.

Create and install a website icon on your page. This teeny-tiny graphic will make it easier for people to recognize and bookmark your site. When your visitor wants to return to your website, your unique favicon will stand out among other bookmarked sites. Try making a favicon that goes with your theme and logo.

If you want your website to cater to the needs of visitors, it must be user-friendly and simple to navigate. Make all links prominent and easily located. Simple menus will make navigation easy for your visitors. Ensure your site users can easily find the way to the pages are the main ones by providing links to them on each subordinate page.

Have a visible tagline on every page and sub-domain. You should use a large, easy to read text so that the viewer immediately sees them when they’re following links. The tagline should sum up the reason for the page’s existence. Visitors should know whether they have any business at the site just by looking at the tagline.

CAPTCHAs are only useful when people are registering for your website, otherwise skip them. You don’t want site visitors working hard just to see your webpage. Most people are likely to leave your page and go elsewhere.

Imitation might be the best form of flattery, but when it comes to web design it’s important to develop your own ideas. Develop your own designs and features, as well as improving upon ones that you have seen on other sites. Implementing this technique will help you to create a quality website.

If you work with a company that offers web design, remember to pay all of your bills when they’re due. The company you hire will be responsible for keeping your website up-to-date. If you haven’t been paying them on time or completely, they may no longer feel that you are entitled to prompt service when there is a problem with the site. Treating them fairly and paying them on time can help you build a rapport, and get your site the attention it needs.

White is an effective and visually attractive background color for a website. Studies show that a white background with black text is the easiest for people to read, leading your content to appear expert and trustworthy. Colors, patterns or other designs are distracting and don’t have a place on a website. Simple is almost always the best option for background.

Avoid having pop-up windows on your website. Most people will be turned off by a site that pop’s windows up in their face. Many visitors to your site may simply exit the site when faced with a pop-up. If this happens, they are unlikely to return.

If you plan to use advertisements on your website, you must keep them to a minimum. Having too many ads will give your website a spammy look and will make you seem unprofessional. Only include the advertisements that are important to you and your site.

If you want your site to become more visible to online users, you must learn to use proper meta tags for each page. Having some meta tags that offer quality will be able to help show different search engines what your site is all about. If you do not have good meta tags that describe your site well, you are not going to attract many visitors to your site.

You can create concept sketches before starting the coding of your site. This is a great tool in helping you to decide the functionality for your site, and how you want it to appear. It is the perfect starting point.

Check with your host to make sure video hosting is allowed if you have the intent of hosting videos on your site. Many hosts do not permit video hosting to be used on their servers. The files (FLV) take up a great deal of space on servers, so do not waste your time and efforts including them on your site; learn the rules beforehand.

The web design process doesn’t end when you roll out your new website. It’s important to actively monitor, adjust and update your site. This does not mean that you have to constantly change it, though you will have to preform some regular updates. That is certainly the case if you plan to host videos or discuss current events. There is more to updating a website than there is to updating a blog. It takes quite a bit of work.

Use a sensible background for your site. Remove obstacles to easy text reading by avoiding things like GIF backgrounds that move. Select backgrounds that work in harmony with the site, not in competition with it, and visitors will find your material much more accessible and useful.

Start out with building small websites so that you can determine what areas you worked on that were good, and what areas you worked on that were not so good. Start with an index page that introduces your business and products, then use what you learn from that page’s feedback to build additional informational pages.

The introduction to this article stated that new web designers need to learn certain fundamentals in order to craft websites that look good and work well. It might be hard to know where to start since there are so many different resources to choose from. This article is a good starting point, as it contains the basics of good web design.

Richard Vanderhurst

Website Design Tips That Make A Difference

You can always learn more about web design, despite your level of experience. It’s hard to find the best tips when so many websites offer web design advice. This article is a great start! Check out the information below and discover all the best easy techniques to help you create that perfect website without the headaches.

Most of the time, visitors go to a website to learn something or to do something, rather than ooh and aah at the site’s design. Keep your pages minimal, easy to navigate, and focused, so your website communication will be easily understood and appreciated by your visitors. The simpler your content, the more quickly it should load.

Make sure that you thoroughly check the code on each webpage that you design. A lot of WYSIWYG editors will put a bunch of junk code on the design of your site. If you use a WYSIWYG editor, go the extra mile and validate your site code through a service. The W3C provides a no cost service that validates web pages.

Make sure an international audience can understand your content. Formats for dates, times, currencies and units of measure should be easily comprehensible by people everywhere. Not everyone in a single country will view your content, so make it feasible for as many as possible to understand it.

Solicit feedback from visitors to your website. This way, you will know what you’re doing right and wrong and you can fix any problems that your visitors are coming across so others don’t have to deal with the same issues. If you actively seek your visitors’ feedback and make changes as a result, your visitors will feel like active participants in your site. This will encourage them to keep visiting the site.

Remember that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to design your website. There are lots of costly, fancy tools for web design; however, without fail, each one has a less costly (or even free) counterpart. Free open source software, for example, can often help you accomplish the same tasks as paid software. You can save a lot of money by using freeware or open source software.

Think like an artist when designing your website. This means that you should be prepared to receive inspiration as it occurs. Draw sketches for possible design ideas when you think of something interesting. Or, if you think of something at work, call home and leave yourself a message to remind you.

A basic layout is best for your website, this way you can get a handle on the basics of web design initially. By starting with the basics and slowly increasing the complexity, you ensure that you develop solid fundamentals, which will give you a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

Meta tags that are pertinent, are one of the best ways to ensure your site attracts the right visitors. Using relevant meta tags on each page of your site will help search engines categorize the page and show it to people who want to know about your page’s topic. Yet you want meta tags of high quality, and you want to make sure that the content of your site is reflected from these meta tags so you can attract as many visitors as possible.

Stay away from pop-up windows as part of your design. Pop-ups are an irritating distraction, at best, for most web surfers, and the possible benefits you could reap with them are extremely modest. Many visitors to your site may simply exit the site when faced with a pop-up. If this happens, they are unlikely to return.

A successful website needs to work for visitors using any browser, so it is important to test your web pages to make sure they display properly in different browsers. If something works in Chrome it might not work in Firefox, for example. Prior to formally launching your site, verify that it displays correctly in each of these popular browsers.

Most visitors don’t like to come to a website that has pop-up windows. Many browsers block these types of pages automatically, before the user even sees them. Therefore, you should avoid these techniques. If you’re considering using these particular techniques for navigation, you need to think about whether the entire navigation system that you have for your website needs improving.

Make sure your website is attractive as well as easy to use. If you have a poorly designed site, your visitors will most likely leave in a hurry. Make things simple so that the content is the focus of your site.

When choosing a web host, know exactly what comes with the plan you’re thinking of selecting. Find out how much disk space, bandwidth or CPU usage you are allowed. Know what you’ll end up with, if you decide to go forward with it.

You will design a better site if you keep learning every step of the way. When you figure out a certain portion of web design, you need to explore another one. This could lengthen the time it takes to build your initial site, but you’ll learn how to expertly crank them out by the time you’re done.

You can use some free software to help set up your site. It is not necessary to spend a large amount of money on web designing software with the number of quality, free programs available. Do some searching and you’ll find some excellent free tools to use.

All the links on your site should be checked regularly. Good web design should always be easy to navigate, and free of error messages. Check weekly to see if each link on the site works.

As you have read from the above article, it doesn’t matter what your skills are where web designed is concerned as you should be looking at the basics first. You can easily learn the basics for free on the internet if you are motivated. Hopefully, you have gained some good insight here that will increase your confidence and success with website design.

Richard Vanderhurst

Make A Splash With These Web Design Tricks

It can be both exciting and frightening to design your website, especially if are not very experienced on the subject. The tips in this article will help you find the best way to go about designing your website.

You don’t have to do everything yourself. Creating a comprehensive website will require knowledge in design, programming, interface, content and SEO. Do not hesitate to call in the experts when needed. You can always resort to hiring a web design company to finish any tasks you’re unable to do on your own. You can even ask them for advice as they do it so you can take it over and do it yourself next time.

Don’t load your site with dozens of ads. Having too many ads will give off an unprofessional appearance and can make people think it is a spam site. Only include the advertisements that are important to you and your site.

The design tools which come with your web hosting account are a great way to practice your skills, but they are no replacement for real design know-how. You want to integrate your own personality into this site, and this means tweaking and adding some things on your own without the drag-and-drop site-builder the host offers.

You want your title to be descriptive on your website. As an experiment, do a web search for the term “untitled document”. This mistake is too common. It is essential that you name your site. It functions as a significant element in search engine algorithms.

When designing a website for commercial purposes, you shouldn’t utilize a web hosting service that is free of charge. You never want your business site to be bombarded with advertisements from other companies, as this takes away from the chief focus of what your site should be, selling your own products and services. Consider a hosting service that you pay for.

When looking for a professional to help you with your web design needs, you should hire someone that is of no relation to you. It is not wise to hire friends or relatives to design your website. This is because if you do not like the work they are doing, it will be difficult firing a loved one.

If you want to work on your website, you need to have an office space with a door. Take out distractions, and make your workspace efficient and ready for you to get to work. Make your office supplies and tools easily accessible, and keep an optimized work space for your needs.

There are many resources available for people who want to start learning about web design. Many books and magazines are available: choose quality material and you will learn a lot of things. Keeping track of these fountains of knowledge is an easy way to learn more and better your skills.

Build a feedback-gathering mechanism into a website to gather visitors’ opinions. This way, if something is missing or they don’t understand how to use your page, you can fix it accordingly. Letting your visitors get involved helps to ensure they will come to your site again.

Stay creative when designing your site. It’s okay to get ideas from other websites, but make your site as original as you can. Develop your own designs and features, as well as improving upon ones that you have seen on other sites. If you do this, you will be maximizing all of your efforts in your website design.

Web designers should strive for perfection all the time. Of course, no website can be perfect, but setting high standards for yourself will spur you to always try to improve on your work. It doesn’t matter which kind of site you plan to build, as a good attitude will get you far!

Always, always remove old or outdated information off your website. If your website is advertising a festival that occurred three months ago, your readers will just leave. The average online user values fresh content and attention to detail. Set up a regular schedule in order to update your content, and eliminate items which aren’t useful anymore.

Most of your visitors will find popup windows and links that open in new windows irritating. Actually, many users have such attributes disabled through their browsers. Therefore, these approaches are something that you need to avoid using. If you’re considering using these particular techniques for navigation, you need to think about whether the entire navigation system that you have for your website needs improving.

Good meta tagging practices will help your website draw in larger numbers of visitors. Your site can show various search engines exactly what your site is all about when you have meta tags. Your website will under-perform on search engines and draw fewer visitors than it should if you use inappropriate or ill-conceived meta tags.

It’s fine to have a new user fill out a CAPTCHA when he registers for you site, but after that, he shouldn’t see another CAPTCHA. This causes your viewers to believe they have to do some type of difficult problem just for viewing a webpage. All but a site’s biggest fans will leave if they have to fill out too many CAPTCHAs.

To make the most of your site’s space, you need not assume that every single pixel must be accounted for and packed with images, text and videos. Allowing a certain amount of white spaces makes your site more readable; it becomes easier to locate and absorb relevant information.

Create a comprehensive “About Us” page. Web designers often forget to be creative when they create the company bio area of the site. Your site doesn’t have to be one of those sites, though! Let people know a bit about you and what inspired you to get into web design and other things like that.

The process of designing a website is an exciting means of engaging site visitors and spreading the word about your products and brand. If you do this right, you will be a stronger promotions professional. Begin on this path today by using the advice in this article. This will give you a great chance to succeed.

Richard Vanderhurst

Web Design Tricks That The Pros Use

Creating a website can be hard. You may be wondering how to create a unique design. How do you start learning the necessary programming languages? This article will help you to figure out what it will take to create a site which not only looks great, but helps to promote your content.

Make sure your content is relevant to many different contexts and cultures. Ensure that you provide measurements, dates, times and currency figures in terms that can be understood by a world-wide audience. Most sites won’t be viewed by just locals, so people in many countries need to be able to understand and relate to the content.

Be sure to make your site title as descriptive as possible. Take a moment to plug the words “untitled document” into your favorite search engine. This is often a common error. You must name your site. When search engines put your pages out there, they use algorithms that tap into the page titles.

This tip may seem like common sense, but it is crucial. Proofread every word of content for informational or grammatical errors before uploading it to the server. If you miss any it will make your content look unprofessional, cheap and untrusttworthy. This unprofessional appearance will cause visitors to doubt your trustworthiness and cost you traffic.

Your visitors do not want to be accosted with pop-up ads or multiple windows opening from links. As a matter of fact, you will find many will get this functionality removed through their browser. Therefore, these approaches are something that you need to avoid using. If you want to use popups in your navigation, it’s probably a sign that you need to rethink your navigation scheme.

Don’t utilize Flash players on your website. Flash can look, well, flashy, but Flash can also be very slow, especially on older computers. Don’t forget that many phones and tablet PCs don’t have Fl;ash enabled, which can ruin the user experience for some and dissuade them from returning to your site.

If you plan to use advertisements on your website, you must keep them to a minimum. If you do this, your site will instantly appear spammy and unprofessional, meaning visitors will not be attracted to it. Only keep the ads which are the most relevant to your site.

There are newsletters that you can sign up for, which will keep you informed about web designing. These are good to get you back on track if you lose sight of your goals, and motivate you to get on the right path. Both pros and novices can benefit from reading good newsletters.

If you want your website to get more visitors, take care to use relevant, up-to-date meta tags on every page of your site. Using relevant meta tags on each page of your site will help search engines categorize the page and show it to people who want to know about your page’s topic. Yet you want meta tags of high quality, and you want to make sure that the content of your site is reflected from these meta tags so you can attract as many visitors as possible.

No matter how aesthetically designed your site is, make sure all files have smaller file sizes. This is because file sizes are directly correlated with load times. You want your website to load as quickly as possible. You must keep in mind that not all visitors will have a fast Internet connection. Continue to test your site to make sure it will load quickly, even with a dial-up connection.

Use basic fonts which every user will be able to see. Professional websites use professional fonts. Don’t use handwriting or comic fonts as most people won’t have them installed. If a site visitor has not installed a certain font on his or her computer, it may display as a default font. Many times, the result is very unappealing.

You should have a visible tagline included on not only every webpage that is in the domain, but also the sub-domains. These tags should immediately draw the visitors’ eyes when the page loads. Good taglines are high on the page and formatted in large, clear text. A tagline of this type will clearly identify what is offered on the page and have a defined purpose.

Set up your site so that visitors can cancel actions they initiate if they change their minds. An action can be classified as completing a form or registering to receive content, like a newsletter. If you do not give site users the opportunity to cancel an action, they are not likely to return to your site. Over time, this could negatively impact your sales and site traffic.

If you design websites, think of yourself as an artist. By that, we mean you should be open to inspiration all the time. If you’re eating some sushi and think of something cool to put on your website, grab your iPad and record the idea. If something comes up at work, call yourself and leave a message on your phone so you’ll remember it later.

Choose a good background. Some websites have backgrounds that make the website’s text hard to read, while other websites have backgrounds that contain elements that annoy visitors such as gif animations. Chose a background that complements your website’s content, rather than a background that clashes with your website’s content. Your website’s visitors will then find it easier to read your website’s content.

If you want your website to cater to the needs of visitors, it must be user-friendly and simple to navigate. Ensure that links are easy discovered and displayed in a prominent location. Menus will make it a lot easier to navigate around your site. Ensure that you have a link to your website’s home page on every page on your website so that visitors can easily return to you site’s main page.

The advice in this article is an excellent starting point for aspiring web designers, so keep them in mind when drawing up plans for your first website. To stay on top of the competition, you must continue learning about new ideas, technology, advancements and techniques in website design.

Richard Vanderhurst

Discover How To Design Your Site Like A Pro

Doing web design yourself can seem scary and fun, particularly if you’re inexperienced. This article will provide you with a firm background of what is involved, as well as how to do it.

All the links on your site should be checked regularly. Sound web design favors the user, if you have links that are broken or go to error messages, users will go away. To prevent these things from happening, create a time frame at regular intervals where you check all the links for proper functionality.

A newsletter can help you to get more repeat visitors to you website. This can be an excellent way of building your client base. Offer the signup form as a link off to the side on your site. Make sure you have a way to keep track of who signed up. Stay on the ethical path and only send newsletters to users who request them.

Set up a visual sitemap to help you with planning the website. You’ll be able to visualize how your site is growing as you add each new part. The sitemap lets you quickly identify any problems or weaknesses that need to be improved upon or repaired. Few things are better than a visual aid.

Each page of your website needs to have a descriptive title. Just for fun, look-up the search term “untitled document” on the web. You will see what a common mistake not providing a webpage or website with a title is. You must name your site. Search engines make use of this as a large portion of the algorithms they use for determining page rank.

Even after you have your web page launched and operation, you will need to tweak it occasionally. Do not simply abandon your site after you have launched it. While there is no need to change things around every day, you must, nonetheless, update it regularly. This is important if you have content that includes videos, a podcast or articles. Making changes to a website requires more work than posting on a blog. You will need to work.

No matter how aesthetically designed your site is, make sure all files have smaller file sizes. There is a direct correlation between file sizes and page load times. It is always a good idea for your website to load as quickly as possible. Remember that not all people who visit your site will have a high-speed connection to the Internet. Your website should be tested on all connections, even a dial-up connection, to make sure it loads quickly.

Video is an increasingly important element to any website, so make sure that your hosting service can accommodate it. Some hosts do not permit videos to be hosted on their servers. Those FLV files absorb a great deal of server space that simply may not be available to you. Before putting the effort into this feature, make sure you’re not wasting your time.

Don’t use Flash on your site. Flash looks exciting and fun, but it will cause some peoples computers to lag, freeze, or reject the site altogether. Also, many computers, especially tablet computers like the iPad, do not even have Flash capabilities. Not being able to see elements of your site might cause visitors to leave and never return.

You will design better websites if you keep learning about web design. As soon as you figure one aspect of site design out, you should attempt to tackle another. Although this can slow the process of building your site, you’ll receive the information that is needed to spit out dozens of sites as you learn.

It may be best to avoid hiring someone of a close social relation to you as your web designer, and instead to opt for a more formal professional. When trying to find someone to design a webpage, hiring family members or friends isn’t a good idea. If the work is substandard, firing the help will be a problem.

You want to ensure that your content is usable across the world. Ensure that you provide measurements, dates, times and currency figures in terms that can be understood by a world-wide audience. Keep your mind open and think globally, so you can gain a larger audience.

Exercise some moderation if you intend to incorporate sound into your website. Visitors to your site can get annoyed if they are unable to control or mute sound on your website. Linking to sounds is a better idea than having them play automatically, and your readers will appreciate being given the option.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to create the whole website alone. You’ll need to have an understanding of graphic and UI design, coding, SEO and creation of effective content to create a great website. You shouldn’t be ashamed to find help when it’s needed. So, consider hiring a specialist to help you make your website great.

Photoshop is a good program to use if you are a beggining web designer looking to manifest an attractive site. Photoshop and similar programs enable amateurs to design sites quickly. If you don’t have PS, it can be difficult and time consuming building a nice site quickly.

If you’re thinking about having ads on your site, keep the number of ads low. The more ads you have, the less trustworthy and professional your site will look. Include only enough ads to make decent revenue without compromising your site.

Meta tags are key to your site if you want to attract people to your site for short and long periods of time. Make sure you include them. Quality meta tags describe your site for search engines. Not putting enough effort into their content can severely hurt your page rank and reduce your traffic.

When developing your website, you should view it as a way to target your audience and promote your product or service. When done correctly, a good website is a great add-on to give you the ammunition needed to promote your business. So begin today by incorporating some of these tips into your own web design projects and develop a successful site.