Your One-Stop Shop For Helpful Web Design Advice

Ben Thoden Jul 28, 2012 · 2 min read

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Designing you own website can be an exciting prospect and an overwhelming one! This article can help you, no matter your level, with many tips and ideas to build the best website possible.

Your website needs to have easy navigation, if you want to have multiple visitors. Links should be highly visible and easy to locate. You can also improve your website’s navigation by using simple menus. Have your main page links located on every page so visitors can easily go through your site.

TIP! Your site logo should link back to the home page of your site. As time has gone on, people have come to expect that logos are clickable and will take them to a homepage.

You are in the right direction if you are using a web host‘s website building tools, but it is not ideal to rely solely on those tools. It is ideal that you add an element of uniqueness and personality to your website. This will mean that you need come up with new design elements that are not obtainable by using the provided options of the host’s WYSIWYG editor.

When you add videos to your site, remember that some people don’t have high bandwidth. For example, converting your videos at 5,000 kb/s may be too fast for a user’s connection to handle. This can cause the video to load very slowly, and buffer more often than you would like.

Continue learning as you design a site. Once you have tackled one site design aspect, move on to the next one and master that one, too. While this will take time, it will be worth it in the end when you know enough to create site after site.

TIP! Don’t use Flash on your site. Although it provides some unique effects and very snazzy aesthetics, there are many people out there using older computers that will start to lag, or even crash, when they visit a Flash-heavy website.

You will save yourself a lot of time and trouble if you avoid those free hosting sites from the very beginning. Although it can be tempting to save money, particularly for someone just starting out, free hosts slam your site with a lot of ads, and you will have no input into which ads appear on your site. This will negatively impact your design and cause customers to leave and not come back, costing you more than the hosting ever would.

Your website is a great way to promote your company or product and to reach your intended audience. Think of designing your website as a part of your marketing campaign. Begin on this path today by using the advice in this article. This will give you a great chance to succeed