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As a novice web designer this question probably looms in your head. What are the ways to be a better web designer? Mastering the visual design, usability, utilization, and coding are some of the most important issues to have an effective design implementation of web site. Aside from those issues, however, knowing the basic details is an important element of essential web design; either you are just starting to work as web designer or a professional one.
Some of the most essential things every web designers should know:
Know your goal. As a web designer, what is your first goal that comes into your mind when building a website? Maybe, making money online or to tell a story with a personal website on the web. But wanting and building a good web site is another one. Your first goal therefore is to have an effective web design. In marketing sense, a poor web design has no sales. And no sale means no traffic and no visitors. A poor design is as good as a web site not existing.
Build a website and keep it simple. We always heard this dictum that simplicity is beauty. Simplicity must always be the first guiding principle when you start thinking and developing your ideas to your website. With all the tools and technology are just within our reach, it must be attempting to build a complex web design. This is a no-no. Visiting readers visits a website to find information and it always their instant gratification that guides them. They demand you to give them the information as fast and clearly as possible. Failure to meet their expectation to your website, there is always the back button they can hit and you would likely lose your visitors because of poor implementation of your website.
Know the HTML. If you aspire to be a better web designer in this field, master your HTML. HTML is the right tool to have an effective web design. This will help you execute properly your ideas that will make your website worthwhile and interactive to visitors.
If you don’t know a single thing about HTML, there is always the Google search engine that can help you have some basic knowledge about HTML. You can search for online tutorial (like w3school tutorial for HTML) and start studying HTML with your own risk.
Use basic fonts. In web design there are fonts that are considered to be web safe. These web safe fonts like “Helvetica”, “Arial”, and “Time New Roman” are widely used and installed for every computer. When you use a font that your visitors do not have installed in the computer, the web browser will choose default fallback fonts. These fallback fonts will likely destroy your website’s layout and make the content difficult to read.
Stick with standard layout. A flash-basedweb sitecreates an impression of creativity. However,most Internet users nowadays expect a conventional layout. Understand that your visitors hate to wait and flash-based layout takes time to upload. With conventional layout, you can be certain that it does not slow down the browsing process and helps maintain a good user interface.
Keep your images small. Try to design your website with graphics small in file size. The lower the file size of images, the faster the loading process of your web site. Save the images with graphic formats such as jpeg, GIF, or PNG extension.
Keep your code clean. Learn the proper technique of coding HTML. Keeping your HTML’s code clean helps your site to load faster and conserve bandwidth.
Avoid distracting elements on your page. Design your web page with balance between those animated gifs and flashy advertisement. Place them in a proper table in a way that it is not distracting and annoying to visitors.
