So you have decided to set out and build your own website! Building your own website can be a lot of fun and a lot of work but the finished product is usually always worth it. You end up with exactly what you envisioned instead of just what you were able to communicate well to a designer. Here are a few website design tips to get you going.
Fast loading pages are one of the single most important things you can focus on. If your sites do not load quickly your bounce rate is going to be significantly higher and people who planned to head to your site will never see it because they will not wait. You are shooting for a 10 second or less load time for a page anything above that is going to cause bounces in high volume.
The next most important thing is navigation. You need to make it super simple for a user to figure out where they need to be. Make sure your navigation is prominent and easy to find. It is usually best to do it along the top of the page or the top of the left hand side depending on your design.
Make sure you are using dimensions that work on every single resolution. Screen resolutions vary widely so it is always better to design with percentages rather than pixels so your website scales depending on the resolution of the end user.
Browser compatibility can be the single most frustrating part of web design. You finish a page and everything is perfect or so it seems. Browsers do not all work exactly the same. So the way you see something in IE may not be the same as chrome which may not be the same as Firefox. So be sure to check your design in all browsers before launching a page.
Stick to professional fonts. Using fancy fonts not only looks unprofessional in most cases but not all fonts are what are considered "web safe" which basically means that there is a particular set of fonts that everyone sees the same ways. Anything outside of these fonts may or may not be displayed to the end user and if they do not have the font installed it will default to there regular font which might give your website a totally different look and feel than you intended.
Following these simple website design tips will help you create beautiful and functional pages that you can be proud of.