Web Design for Beginners, define your audience and their needs

Easy navigation

In order to make your content easy for your intended audience to navigate, make sure the links to the main sections of your website are easily visible from each web page. You want to invite people to view as many pages of your site as possible, so make it easy for them to find each page.

A good way to help you visualize the structure of the site is to create a flow chart of the whole website on paper. Think about think about how your users might structure the information within the site to help them find the information they need easily.

Layout

Bullet points, lists and relevant photos can help to break up the text.

Learning the basics of html, even if you are using WYSIWYG software Front Page or Dreamweaver - will help you gain an understanding of how a web page in built, and deal with problems you encounter using the software. Tables mix 'presentational' data in with your content, which makes the file size of your pages unnecessarily large, as users must download this presentational data for each page they visit. But by using structural markup to create web pages, you can keep the actual content of your page separate from the way it is presented.

Using color

Creating a balanced color palette from which to choose your website color scheme will help you to create a professional looking website. Bright clashing colors scream amateur.

If you are creating a website for a company with a logo, start here. Upload the logo to your host server and go to a color palette website such as http://www.colorhunter.com to create a palette, from which you can choose colors for the main banner, buttons and text rollovers etc. Optimizing photos and images

One sure sign of an amateurish website is a page with a huge image that takes forever to load. It is a good format for saving images with fewer colors, like charts and small graphics, images containing text, and drawings.

Making Your First Homepage Does Not Have to Be Scary

Hosting and maintenance of your website is important because it ensures that your customers always get to your website when they type your web address into their browser. If you do not have your site hosted professionally then your visitors might get an error message when they try to visit your site. It is very important that visitors feel comfortable with your homepage. In the world of online business, your homepage is often your visitor's first impression of you or your company. It is also very important to use your keyword phrase multiple times on our homepage. That way search engines have an easier time linking prospective customers to your sites when they perform a search.