Web design is a relatively new trade. But even so – take note – this new trade is all the rage these days. Every smart person looking to set up his or her own business knows that a business website is important, even crucial, to success.

As an aspiring web designer, what do you do with this information? You get better. Everybody starts somewhere. As an amateur web designer, I suggest you follow these simple tips to help you design a high quality and professional-looking website.

1. Make Navigation Easy
Driving visitors to your website is one thing, keeping those visitors glued to your website is another thing. Amateur web designers should take note that link navigation plays a huge role in keeping visitors from leaving your website.

Ask yourself, what’s the first thing visitors look for when they open your homepage? What other subjects might interest them to prevent them from moving on to another website?

2. Polished Layout Design
Visitors tend to stay longer on websites that looks polished and makes effective use of white space – think Yahoo! and Google.

Also I know it’s tempting to use unique-looking fonts that you don’t see everywhere, but at the risk of your website not working on some computers or web browsers. Are you willing to take that risk?

3. Start Learning CSS Programming
Table-based websites are old, they’re a thing of the past, and you know the modern Internet age doesn’t deal well with things that are old.

Modern web designers are slowly trying to transition to programming using pure CSS. CSS is a lot more accessible, has high reusability, and makes for generally smaller file sizes.

4. Minimize Loading Times
Loading time is very important to a website. Visitors tend to stay away from websites that take more than a couple seconds to show everything on the screen, especially those with slower Internet speeds because, hey, not every lives in South Korea.

As an amateur web designer, make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. Do this by reducing the amount of visuals and Flash content on your website to keep the general file size low.

5. Account For Different Screen Resolutions
Different computers are connected to different monitors, and each of these monitors have different screen resolutions. You need to account for all these when designing a website. Or else what looked like a work of art on a 1440 x 900 resolution turns out to be a complete mess when viewed on a 1280 x 800 resolution monitor.

6. Make Sure Your Website Is Browser-Compatible
A great website means nothing if it isn’t compatible with popular web browsers, mainly Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Apple Safar, Opera, etc. You need to make sure as an amateur web designer that your website will run smoothly on these browsers which, when put together, constitute 90%+ of the world’s web browsers.

Web design is easy if you’ve got the fundamentals down. Follow these simple tips and you’ll be designing great websites in no time.

Author Bio: Calgary Web Design is a great resource of up-to-date web design strategies and techniques for service professionals and small business owners in the Calgary area. Feel free to visit the website at Calgary Web Design for more info on consultation services. Or you can simply visit the website simply for more related articles on web design.

Category: Internet
Keywords: calgary web design, web design tips