Although you may be able to find a lucrative career as a web designer, the reality is that you’ll have a tough time competing with the other professionals in today’s market. But the fact remains that you may want to start your own website. If this is the case, you would do well to learn a thing or two about site design to save money by creating your own website.
When building your own website, you don’t want to complicate things too much. You want a smooth, quick-loading site that gives you few problems. To help achieve this, it’s important that you stick with smaller file sizes for the images you use on your site. Larger file sizes will take longer to load, and it may also complicate things as your folders begin to grow in size.
Beginners dealing with designing their own sites usually have eyes bigger than their plates, to paraphrase an old saying. They see graphics that look great, but they may not function correctly when these elements are implemented on the site. Make sure you choose graphics that are appropriate for the content you’re posting. If it looks out of place, then it is out of place.
Animated images, like GIF images, are very complicated to deal with. Not only do they take up a lot of room and cause unexpected HTLM errors unless you’re very skilled with design, but they also fail to load up sometimes. When someone logs onto your site with a slow connection, they may only see a white box with a red X in the middle. This is the GIF failing to load. So just avoid any potential complications by avoiding animated images. A regular image is more than enough.
One of the best parts about building your own website is that you get to browse through hundreds of different templates and infinite variations you can use with layout options and page elements. This might be bad news for you, however. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Stick with simple, clean, and professional instead of wild and fancy. The more outside of the box you go, the more complications you’ll run into.
There are hundreds of different styles of font you can choose from for the text on your website. This may cause you to get a little carried away, though. Instead of browsing through your options to find something unique, you should instead strive to keep it very simple. Try to stick with fonts from the same family. At the most, only use two families, and avoid those crazy-looking font styles.
On a website, white space is essentially open space that’s unused. This can be at the bottom, over on the side beyond the borders, or even on the page itself. The idea here is to basically leave some space on the site so that it doesn’t look cluttered. Space your elements evenly and make sure you have a consistent look on each page.
Designing your own website allows you to save money and to make the site as personal as you want it. By following the tips above, you should be able to design a professional-looking site without issue.
