Website design tips

Very often, people tries creating a website from scrap, full with ideas - and in most cases, result is not as expected. It is much better to have a step back and make a good planning of what the web will look like, and what the contents should be. Read this article to learn about the tips for website design.

Tools

First important thing is to have a set of valid tools to build a Web. From basic text editors to the full-powered Dreamweaver, you need to find out which tools suit your idea. Depending on the complexity of the planned website, you may need to have (at least basic) knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL. Any computer can do for creating a webpage. You can even install a web server (Apache, XAMPP) if you have basic Internet knowledge.

Layout

When possible, site designs should be make as simple as possible. Check some webs with high traffic in Internet (Google,Wikipedia) - you have direct access to most used links, hence ways to reach all other information easily. A common menu or buttons set is also useful to navigate inside all different pages of your Web, and it should be placed in fixed areas for easy recognition (typically, on top of the page or on the left side). Of course, layout will be also defined by the kind of contents - it is not the same a full-text blog than a photo gallery, or an online shop.

Style

Depending on the Web contents and the target user, you may go for uniform colours and "traditional" sets of icons and layout. Alternatively, you may want to include bright colours, flash animations, banners, links to similar or related pages. Here, the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is very useful to introduce uniform changes all across the website, and (most importantly) for late Web redesign. If you are skilled with PHP, you might also program custom layout and views for each specific user - but that is out of the scope of this post.

Linking

Finally, when designing a website, it is very important to define internal linking (so that the user can easily jump from page to page), but also all external links that are important for your site - related pages, references, partners. Currently also, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is gaining importance. You need to make sure that "important" or known pages will include a link to yours - this will be helpful to increase your ranking in search pages, and to improve your visitors' count.