Design Your Site Like A Pro With These Helpful Tips

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Design Your Site Like A Pro With These Helpful Tips
A website is useful for many things. Not only can websites be used as a sales tool, they can also be a way for you to express yourself. While a lot of people are interested in getting a website, they don't know where to begin. This article has great advice to help you with web design.

Keep your page sizes to a minimum. Not all internet users have fast connection speeds, and the longer your site takes to load, the less interest they will have. You do not want your page viewers to be stuck waiting for every page to download, or they may end up abandoning your site.

Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.

Have a site map. These are useful to your clients and the search engines, as they give a detailed overview of your entire website. It can be a guide for viewers searching for a certain part of your site, and also allow you to keep track of its structure and layout.

You should always put in the effort to make a customized error page for your site; this page should include a basic sitemap that links users to the major sections of your website. This ensures that if visitors follow a bad link or spell your URL wrong, they will be able to find what they are looking for.

While you want to keep the aesthetics of your site in mind, you also need to make every effort to keep your file sizes to a minimum. The reason for this is that your file sizes directly affect how quickly your website loads. You want your site to load as quick as possible. Remember, some of your website's visitors will not be using a fast Internet connection. Test your site to make sure that it loads up quickly, even when accessed on a dial up connection.

Do not use images for your background. When you think about some of the biggest websites on the Internet, they do not have images as backgrounds. When you use image backgrounds, you represent yourself as someone who is not well-versed in web designing. Images as backgrounds also cause your site to load slower, which can lead to user frustration.

Be sure you're using ALT tags for the images while you design a website. There are a few core reasons why ALT tags should be used, including helping the visually impaired, providing indexing possibilities for the search engines and also for description and translation purposes. In addition, ALT tags allow you to describe how a link behaves if you utilize your images as links. The last thing is that ALT tags attract search engine crawlers, so you can get a better ranking by using them.

Forums are going to be your best friend in the next few weeks, this is because there's a lot of information to be gained from various forums where you have the ability to gain endless amounts of knowledge from people all over the world. So check out what websites and forums can help you along your way with web design.

Websites are valuable tools to have at your disposal. People use them to share information or run their own business online. Should you want your own website, then what you have read here can easily help you build the site you want.