As a web designer myself, I can say that learning as much as I could from experts was how I got started. I looked at their sites, checked out their code, and even borrowed from their designs. Today there is a great deal of information available to help you get into the game, and this article is a great place to start learning.
Create a scalable and reliable website. As technology advances and monitors keep changing, you can’t test your site across all platforms and screen sizes. Make sure the design, hosting, and code is scalable. Do this by making sure it’s error-free and making the loading smooth. This helps you create a good design that works for many circumstances.
Creating a visual site map for your website is important. Knowing what you’ll have on each page allows you to prepare ahead of time and to know what direction your site will take.
Stay hungry for new and current information in the web design industry to maintain your competitive edge. As you well know, nearly everything in the tech industry changes at the speed of light, and if you don’t keep up with this progress your site will show it. Design blogs are a great and fast way to keep yourself up to date and competitive.
Understand that when you first start out that it’s going to take time for your site to become popular. You can try your best to generate as much traffic to your site as possible but make sure that you know what to expect so that you can continuously adapt your strategies accordingly.
Try using easy, maintainable and clear navigation. The placement of your navigation links on a website plays an important part in determining how long a visitor will remain on your site. The navigational structure must be neat, consistent, and easy to access for your users to have a better experience.
Make sure your website’s call to action (CTA) is highlighted in your web design. If the visitor can not easily find what you really want them to do next, then you will be hard pressed to get them to move forward in your action cycle. Call out your CTA using icons, white space, a font size increase, bolding or some other format change that works with your design.
When you are designing a page with links, make sure that the link has text content. Links that show content are clearly visible to the visitor so they know what they are clinking on. If there are links on your page without text content, they could accidentally click the link through a keyboard shortcut.
Many web designers make the mistake of trying to completely fill all the white space on their page. You do not have to do that. A clean, simple page can really come off as professional and informative while making it easy to find the information that the visitor had come to the site to find.
Now that I’ve been designing websites for over a decade, I feel that I can give some advice back. Use the tips in this article, continue learning as much as you can, and stay on top of trends to ensure your websites stand out in the crowd. If I can do it, anyone can!