Friday, November 6, 2009

Important Website Setup And Design Tips To Increase Visitor Numbers

By Dhruv Patel

If you are planning to create your own website and launch a presence on the World Wide Web it pays to be aware of important website setup and design tips. For your site to be successful and to attract many visitors it is vital to get the designing done correctly with a professional feel, even if you plan to do it yourself.

It takes time to understand the ins and outs of web designing but it is worth the effort in the long run as you will increase the potential number of hits. On your first attempt your may make some mistakes, but even expert designers had to start somewhere.

If it is your first website then you should not try to create some seriously complicated web pages. Just because a site has a wealth of information does not mean that it will be popular. In fact the more that it contains the slower it will be to load. Today everybody wants websites that appear quickly on their screens and are straightforward to navigate. If you have tried opening a web page that has taken more than ten seconds to load then you have probably not been to keen to revisit it. For this reason you should keep images and sound to a minimum, this includes flash files.

It often helps to think of which websites you have been impressed by. Most often these are the simplest ones that do not give off an extravagant feeling. You should keep your text to the most common fonts such as Arial or Verdana, as other varieties may not be displayed correctly on some people's monitors. Also if you mix up the fonts it can give an unsightly jumbled appearance. The size of the text is another consideration; if it is too small it may be difficult to read, but if it is too big it may look cumbersome and will involve the page having to be scrolled often. Also bear in mind that using frames is now not often suggested by web designers as it can cause problems at a later date.

It pays to test each and every page on as many different sized monitors as you can, this also includes widescreen. You may be surprised to see that the web page that looks perfect on your screen has a messy appearance on another.

It is also vital to test your website on all the major browsers that are now available. It is often the case that just because your website looks perfect in Internet Explorer it may look disjointed in Mozilla or Chrome. This is because browsers will read the code in a different manner.

Before you website can go live on the internet you will need to find a decent web hosting company. There are literally thousands available to choose from. You need to consider what the important factors to you are. This may be the cost, assistance for maintenance, amount of web space given, whether unique email addresses are provided, as well as bandwidth constraints.

It is important to fully research what the different web hosts offer so that you can be sure to be provided with the type of service that you desire.

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