Designing a good website is a long process. How can you make a website that catches someone’s eye the first time they visit it? Do you know anything about coding? This article will help you to figure out what it will take to create a site which not only looks great, but helps to promote your content.

It is important to keep all links on your website up-to-date and working. The hallmark of a solid and well-designed site is user friendliness. Any broken links, or those that produce error messages, frustrate your site visitors. Check your site daily for any problems, and make important updates as often as necessary.

Try to steer clear of free web hosting a commercial website so that you don’t cause issues or lose business. While you will be tempted by the lack of start-up cost involved with these hosts, your site will be littered with ads that you have little or no control over. These advertisements can give your business a bad reputation and can also cause potential customers to leave your site and vow never to return.

If you keep learning as you are designing a website, that will be a benefit to you. Once you have tackled one site design aspect, move on to the next one and master that one, too. While this may lengthen the process of building your first site or two, you will soon have the knowledge you need to crank out websites much faster.

Consider the fact that some users have very little bandwidth before you add videos to your webpage. You may feel that your videos look their best when you stream them out at 5,000 kb/s, but a user with a much slower connection is not going to enjoy the experience. Large videos may have buffering issues on slower connections, making the video hard to watch.

If you need to design more than one website, then you should check into multiple platforms. Your future efforts will be more productive the sooner you learn platforms like Java, PHP, and MySQL. Whether you are designing a new site, or simply helping a friend launch his or her own, a wide variety of experience will help you.

Make sure that the font you are using looks professional, and is easy to read. Check out a site’s fonts to rate it’s professional quality. Avoid silly, bubbly or hard to read fonts and especially avoid obscure fonts that may not be supported by all browsers. If a person doesn’t have a font on their computer, the browser might render the site using the default font (generally Times New Roman). Doing this can make it look even worse.

Using white (unused) space effectively can actually improve your website, so don’t think your website needs to be jam-packed with content. White space improves readability for your visitors, and they will be able to better read and absorb the information you are providing if your site is not cluttered.

Every web page you create should be validated. There are many WYSIWYG editors out there that add a lot of junk code to your site design. Therefore, if you have used one of these programs, take the time for the extra step of validating the code through a specialized validation service. There is a free service available to do this through W3C.

Think things over very carefully before adding Flash content to your website. Flash can slow down visitors’ computers, and make them unlikely to want to stay on your site. Also, keep in mind that there are mobile phones and tablet PC’s which are not flash enabled, and if your visitor goes to your site it will not be a fun experience.

You should always make sure to implement a way that users can submit feedback to you about your website. If you have forgotten something or have made an element of your site confusing to use, they will be able to tell you. Giving your visitors a voice makes them much more likely to return to your site and continue the conversation.

Put a title on your page that adequately describes your site. Take a couple of minutes and search “untitled document” on the Internet. As you will see, page titling is a step that all too may web designers neglect! You must make naming your site a priority. Search engines make use of it as a crucial part of the algorithms to do with results listings.

You should update your content and get rid of expired content regularly. If the page a viewer clicks on is promoting something that happened a year ago, you just lost a reader. If your website looks neglected and disused, your potential customers will surely take their business elsewhere. Set a schedule to review the site, to ensure that outdated information is removed, and fresh new content is added in its place.

Create and install a website icon on your page. Make you site recognizable in your customer’s favorites list with this small graphic. When your visitor wants to return to your website, your unique favicon will stand out among other bookmarked sites. Just be sure that you favicon is aligned with the theme of your site.

Start building the first page of your site with a template to keep the process simple and straightforward. Beginning with a no-frills site allows you to constantly innovate and change things as you learn new techniques.

You should test your site on multiple browsers. Every browser interprets sites in their own way, and sometimes that can lead to drastic differences in the way a site appears to a user, affecting not only visual elements, but functional elements as well. There are a lot of ways you can determine which browsers are most popular at the current time. Do not neglect mobile browsers, as they are increasingly used by people of all ages; test to see that your new site works across a full spectrum of browsers.

Remember what you just read when you start sketching your design. Keep reading and learning to keep up with all the new technologies and advancements that appear daily to ensure your website is better than the competitions’!