The best way to be successful is to avoid the mistakes of your predecessors. That means learning all you can from them and about the errors they have made. This article provides you with some hurdles they have faced and how you can avoid them yourself. The more you know, the better a web designer you will become.
Content which is hard to digest won’t work. You have to have smaller chunks of text which is easy to scan through. Visitors won’t necessarily be focused on what they are doing, so they have to be able to quickly get the gist of what you are trying to say before they dedicate themselves to reading the content in full. This means using lists, headings and bullet points to get your message across quickly and easily.
Link text which is confusing or irrelevant won’t help your search engine optimization strategy, nor will it help readers to click through to other pages. Most people will link not thinking of how the text they use impacts their site.
For example, linking from “click here” is always a horrible mistake. It doesn’t tell the reader what they are clicking through to, and Google won’t know how to categorize the page it lands on. Instead, use descriptive text like, “handmade bracelets from Brazil” or “how to build a birdhouse” for great SEO and reader understanding.
HTML tables are old and no longer relevant. Instead, you should be using CSS to move your text around the page. You can do everything from creating borders, even with rounded corners, padding space around the text and coloring in the background. CSS works in all browsers in the same way, while tables can be mixed up or even broken by some platforms. CSS is also fast and completely reliable.
Complex navigation only leads to people leaving your website. The simpler your navigation set-up is, the happier your readers will be. Think that less is going to do more for your site. Give the reader less than seven main menu headings, and then include sub-menus if you need to have more links available.
Your menus should be repeated on every page in the same place and in the same style. Don’t leave your visitors confused by changing the layout on every page.
Badges don’t mean anything to anyone anymore. Once upon a time, they let the world know your site was safe to surf, part of a network or endorsed by other websites. Today, no one cares about badges and most will just ignore them. They suck up your bandwidth, make your site load slow and offer nothing of value to the reader. Unless your badge is from a reputable security company, skip it completely.
Becoming an excellent web designer means you have to pay attention to both good and bad strategies. If you understand the mistakes of others, you won’t make them yourself. Use this article to learn all you can and be sure that you are on the right path towards success.