The Internet is everywhere – On our phones, portable devices, and even on some of our wearables! Since the dawn of broadband and high-speed connections, the web development and design industry has seen a period of unprecedented growth, creating new developers and designers on a daily basis. Looking to step foot into this fun, exciting profession? Not sure where to start looking to get acquainted with things? Or, are you a do-it-yourself, and want some professional web design tips on how to make your website stand out? Rest assured, you have come to the right place. Here are some professional web design tips and tricks to make your website stand out!
Step 1: Get Educated
There is an endless wealth of information and knowledge available on the internet today. What good are web design tips if you do not first understand the basics? First things first, you surely want to have a solid understanding of color theory. If your colors do not look well together, how can you expect your user to want to stay on your website?
Next, it would be wise to tinker with HTML and CSS languages, the foundation of web development! CodeCademy offers some great, hands-on and free lessons to get you quickly up to speed.
Step 2: Step Up your Font Game!
There is not better way to make your site stand out then by accenting it with beautiful, unique, fonts. Head on over to Dafont or FontSquirrel and install some fresh new fonts! Be careful though – it is very easy to get carried away. You want to select an really cool font for your logo, and maybe some aspects of the site, but you do not want to hinder the site’s overall readability by having EVERYTHING in a specific font – especially one that may be hard to read! Balance is key.
Step 3: Use Dummy Text
Of course, you want to make your website content as unique and “beefy” as possible. However, you will most likely not have all of the content you need at your disposal when initially developing the site. Because you want to make sure you can predict how the site will look when all content areas have been filled out, I reconmend one of the most overlooked web design tips- filling up these sections with some Lorem Ipsum, or “Dummy” text. For more info on the Lorem Ipsum text, and to grab some for your blank text areas, head on over to Lipsum.com!
Step 4: Embrace Proven Ideas
If you peek around the internet and look at a few websites, you will start to notice a few website layouts that work. You may also, on the other hand, see some layouts that are difficult to navigate or just simply don’t make sense. Successful websites are laid out a certain way for a reason – They Work! They keep a user’s attention, and allow for easy navigation and conversions. Why not study a few of your favorite websites, and keep their designs in mind when working on yours?
Step 5: Download Some Free Resources
Not everything has to be done from scratch – There are many free resouces and pre-made graphic or design elements to get you started! I would suggest poking around GFXTRA and GAAKS for starters. The internet is filled with plenty of high quality resources to help enhance your designs – you just need to find them! They may even spark your creativity, and help you to take your website in a completely new direction – one you maybe never even imagined before checking out the resources.
Step 6: Use a Programming- Friendly Editor for Text
This may seem silly amid these web design tips, but It may be a good idea to keep the notepad program open on your computer, or have ready access to some other programming- friendly text editor when developing. Sometimes, when you copy text from one place or program to another, you may still have some unneeded formatting along with it. By using such a text editor, you do not need to worry about this happening!
Step 7: Study Cross Browser Compatability
We have all heard horror stories about Internet Explorer and how some sites do not look good on it. These stories, unfortunately, are true! When developing a website, one of the most important web design tips to keep in mind is that you want to checkout how it looks on all of the major browsers – Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera, to name a few. Sometimes, different browsers can display certain elements differently, and occasionaly some browser speciric fixing is needed. Hey – it’s all in a day’s work!
Step 8: Mobile?
Just as you want to make sure that your website looks good on differnet browsers, you want to make sure that your site looks great on mobile devices – such as Android and Apple devices. Being that more people now browse on mobile than on traditional desktops, if your site is not mobile- responsive, you are destined for doom! Good News – Many themes (if you are using a CMS) are mobile responsive out of the box (for the most part), so there may just be some minor tweaking on your end. No longer will you have to build two seperate sites as was the case some years ago, when smartphones and mobile devices were just coming into being!
Step 9: Use Uniue Content!
This one is crucial – do not, I repeat, do not use the same copy or text from another website. This is a BIG no no for Google. If you want to rank well, doing this will instantly and immediatly work against you. Google loves content, but it has to be unique content. If it is not unique or origional, you are better off not even including it.
Step 10: Utilize a CMS
Using a CMS instead of building a site from scratch will not only drastically cut down the development time, but will also make your website incredibly easy to manage. There is already a great open source community surrounding such Content Management Systems like Joomla and WordPress, and there is much potential out there from great developers. From plugins, to extensions, to themes, you will likely find something cool that will benefit your project, and make the development process both more fun, and user friendly!
But it is good for beginners to start project from scratch instead of using cms
Of Course! It is up to the person to decide what route to select. We recommend using a CMS, but it is always good to have background knowledge of HTML and CSS just in case they need to edit a stylesheet to make a change that was not able to be made in the theme. However, if they do have a lot of time to devote, starting from scratch can offer a world of firsthand experience!
The first tip is so important. I hate going into things blind and honestly learning basic coding in HTML and CSS is not that bad. It might actually come in handy, it’s a great skill to have. Thanks for sharing!
Catherine-
We could not agree more! Not only can it be fun to dabble with code here and there, but It is great to look at a website and know exactly how it was set up! Great reply!