If you’ve ever seen those commercials boasting about technical schools, then you already know that careers like web design are in high demand. What you might not have known, however, is that you do not need to attend a special school or take a course to learn web design. You can pick up the skills necessary from these tips below.
For multimedia presentations, take advantage of the new HTML5 standard. Although HTML5 isn’t quite as robust for animation and games as Flash, it has the advantage of working stably on mobile phone browsers, including those contained in Apple hardware. HTML5 is also quite a bit leaner than Flash, so load times will improve, as well.
Avoid creating user interface (UI) controls that mislead your visitors. These controls include elements, widgets and more that create an interactive experience, such as a link, drop-down list or button. You do not want to make visitors think that clicking on an underlined word or phrase for example, will lead to a new page if it is not actually linked to something else. When your visitors have expectations of something working a certain way and it does not, they are more likely to assume there is something wrong with your site and leave.
Try designing for all screen resolutions. A simple website can always encourage visitors to remain and read the content. If your site doesn’t look good for a specific resolution, the visitor may leave since they cannot view it. Designing a stretchier layout that fits any screen resolution lets you know that all visitors can enjoy the content.
When tinkering with your HTML, you always need to save a copy. You can save a copy of your code in a Notepad doc; just save it as .html and it will save as an actual webpage. This way, you can tinker around with things and know that there’s a backup should something go wrong. Failure to save pages may result in having to start from scratch.
When selecting a domain name, it’s important that you’re creative. A big part of web design is having a site with a good, on-topic name. Having a catchy, relevant name will make people remember your website just as much as any design features would. Don’t think that a name isn’t an important feature.
Start small when learning how to build a website so you can figure out what you know, and what you need to get better at. Besides keeping them small, your initial efforts should also be simple. Avoid complex multimedia and advanced structures to begin with, and stick with basic pages of text and pictures.
Selecting a good domain name is a very important aspect of website design. When you type an address in the web browser, do you use the famous www sub domain? Most people like to just type the address without using this, meaning you must design your site to be able to accept both.
Of course, you won’t find every single tip under the sun in one article. No article is that long. You should be able to get the hang of web design through these tips, however.
Once you master these few techniques, you can then begin to expand your knowledge base and ultimately expand the scope of your designs.
