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.
When designing your website, create independent CSS pages for the web browsers and use conditional loading. Using these techniques makes it much easier for testing and ensuing maintenance later on. All websites need to be maintained at some point, and you want it to be as simple as possible so you can easily make changes.
It may look pretty, but stay away from having too many animations on your site. Having your sales splash page rotate, spin and blink may look cool to you, but it will likely drive potential viewers away. When you add too many flashy splashes like that, it makes your site look amateurish which is not the message you want to convey.
When designing a website, you should remember that people always read content left to right. This is the same for all web sites so make sure that you put the most important information you want the visitors to see up high and to the left side of each page.
When you are planning your web design project, do not use scripting that will be intrusive to the user. Examples being, your preventing right clicking on the site or forcing pop ups. Both of these will be detrimental to the user. You may feel this aids in your design, but it will probably cause visitors to look for another page, instead.
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.
A good tip for all web designers is to choose whatever development platform you use, extremely carefully. All development platforms are not created equal and there are some, such as WYSIWYG, that are not nearly as reliable as other platforms. Make sure you do your research before deciding what to use.
Build your website using a content management system. Knowing how to build a website using just HTML and CSS is good foundation knowledge, but this can only produce a static website. Web design has evolved into providing dynamic content. If you couple your coding skills with the use of a content management system, you can practically build any type of website that you desire.
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.
