Free Web Site Design Tips
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Here are 10 free web site design tips that you can use to help you design your website. There are many affordable web site companies and web designers around the world but sometimes you can save money by learning how to do some web site design yourself. 1. Resist the temptation to use a dark background (such as black), and bright text (such as red) when you design a website. Although at first, it seems to look cool and different, long term exposure causes eye fatigue. After all, the whole idea is to keep the viewer on a website as long as possible. Stick to a light background with a contrasting dark font. Of course, there are exceptions, and this is one of the lessons that I had the hardest time with. 2. Stick to a font that is easy to read, such as "Arial" or "Verdana". Using fonts that are difficult to read may look cool at first, but the goal is to get your message across. When designing a website, just imagine what others would like if they looked at your web design. 3. Be consistent in the overall theme of your site. This includes not only colors, but the layout. Most importantly would be the navigation. Make your links clear and accessible. People should be able to look at your website design and navigate around each web page easily. 4. Do not load your web pages up with needless graphics. This will only slow down the loading of the page. The rule of thumb is, you want the web page to load in 10 seconds or less for a 56k dialup viewer. By putting huge photo files, or too many animated (GIF) images, you may lose viewers before they even get to see your site. 5. Do not link to graphics like photos, dividers, or GIF images on somebody else's website. This uses their bandwidth, and cuts into their quotas. When a lot of people do that, it can shut a site down. If you like an image, right click on it, and save it to your computer. The only exception is with a banner or button, where you are given permission to link to an image on their website. 6. Avoid FFA (free for all) sites. These sites allow you to submit your site and supposedly obtain thousands of links with one submission. What you will get is spam! Some search engines even frown on FFA listing links. So overall I see no benefit to this. 7. Get a good virus protection program for your computer and keep it up to date. That way, while you are designing a website, you can prevent many problems from ruining your website. This should be mandatory. There are many free programs out there that offer virus protection for your website. 8. This may seem like common sense, but if you don't already have one, get a surge protector. Power outages and lightning strikes can cause mayhem. Better yet, get a battery backup system. A sudden power outage and shutdown not only loses your work, but can damage your hard drive. 9. Back up your web site design pages! If you are like me, you make changes on your website almost every day. Copy your web site to some type of removable storage device, flash drive, or zip drive. If you have to, at least view your website, then "copy and paste" the pages to microsoft word. 10. Put "meta tags" on all the pages on your site. This will increase your chances of being found by search engines like google.com, bing.com, and yahoo.com. Make your title, description, and keyword tags specific to the page they are on. You need to make sure you have a link back to your home page from any page on your site. Then submit your website to the top search engines. |