9 Tips for Designers and Coders to Create a Great Website

Most people new to an endeavor will often look for a magic pill that can help them easily do a task. However, the truth is, there is often no magic pill. The secret is often to research and then to practice, practice, practice. This is not any different when it comes to web design and coding websites. If you want to create a website that will attract a large audience, there are a few things that have been proved to help.

The bottom line is, the website should be easy to use and have an intuitive user interface and work flow. It should also be able to attract the attention of its audience and compel them to share. Whether through your artistic inclinations to design or through your scientific tendencies to code, you should be able to make use of the tips mentioned below in order to achieve the results that you desire.

1. Content should be easy to read and not unnecessarily long

Content meant for a website should ideally be written differently from other type of content; the main reason being that most people who read content online often just skim through, especially when they land onto the front page. This means that you should be able to make an impression by making it easy for the reader to skim through your content and get the essence of what your web page is about.

If you have content that is in a more prose-like format or lengthy that you want your audience to read, it may be better to put it in PDF format. You can simply use a PDF conversion portal to convert your content into PDF format and attach it to your website for those who are interested in it to download.

2. Pages must load quickly

Making sure that your web pages load quickly is crucial to having a website that is viewed by a large audience. If your website doesn’t load fast enough, most people will lose patience within seconds and go to another website that can give them the instant gratification they want.

With the demand for more sophisticated websites that have graphical effects and animations increasing or being expected, this should not be at the expense of a slow website.

Think about it this way, it is better to have a website that has a chance to hook its audience because they actually read the content, as opposed to having a website that has a wow factor which people will never experience because it takes too long to load.

3. Have great website navigation

Just as with slow loading websites, if your audience never gets a chance to see the content on your website, they will not be able to have an opinion memorable enough to come back to your website, which is not what you want. Therefore, making your website appealing such that your audience can understand its logic and can easily and intuitively find a link to the content that they are looking for is vital to its success.

If you have a single page that is long, you should have anchor links to easily move to the various key areas of your content.

4. Use web optimized images

Having optimized images is a key consideration if you intend for your web pages to load quickly (and you do want that). Most budding web designers and developers often get carried away using great quality images that are very large, which unfortunately take too long to load.

There are three simple solutions to this dilemma;

• Only use images that are optimized for the web.
• Use CSS sprites on your web pages so that images load only once and are then cached so that they do not have to reload each time a request to load a web page is made.
• Another simple solution, if you have images that you absolutely want to share, have an external link to an image repository or have a gallery with small thumbnails that can give the reader an idea of the images that they would like to load.

5. Choose the right color scheme for your website and content

Color is a very important aspect of web design because it gives visual cues that are ingrained in people through their traditions and cultures. If you want your website to have an international audience with mass appeal, you should consider what different colors mean to different groups of people.

6. Remember that your audience is global

If you want to make sure that your website attracts the masses, make sure it has global appeal. You could do this easily by ensuring that the website is relevant to people from different countries and language backgrounds. This can be done by allowing the user to toggle currencies, measurements and even languages.

7. Links should be working

People who go to websites are very keen to see if the content on the website is recent and if the website is current and well maintained. One way that audiences can determine that a website is not maintained often is through broken web links. Make use of tools that can crawl through your site and look for web links that are broken so that you can fix them as soon as possible.

8. Make your links self-explanatory

When readers on a website come across web links that they are not sure where they could lead to, they will often avoid them. That is why it is important to have web links that are well annotated to encourage your audience to go to different web pages through your links.

9. Proofread your content

One way to ensure that you lose any traction on traffic that you get on your website is to have sloppily written content. If you have a lot of content on your website that is full of spelling mistakes and poor grammar, your audience may begin to take your work for granted and avoid your website as a reliable resource.

Author Bio

Ellen J. Barnes has been a web developer for the last 7 years. She recommends https://docs.zone to convert the content to PDF format.