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Designing a professional and high quality web site can seem like a difficult task. In reality, there are a few tips that can help anyone when it comes to designing a great website. These tips can come in incredibly handy by pointing out some key areas that both amateur and professional web designers should keep in mind when designing a web site. Even if the person designing the site does not stick to exactly what each tip suggests, he or she should still keep in mind the general idea of the tips that are mentioned in this article.

Tip #1: Consider Your Audience

One of the biggest mistakes that designers make is taking their creative freedom and going crazy with it during the design process. While some designers have the amazing ability to create a truly unique and incredible website, in the end, the site still has to appeal to the audience that it is being marketed towards. It can be tempting to create a unique design and go with it, but if the audience is not receptive to the design of the site, the page will inevitably fail.

Tip #2: Keep it Clean

Clean layouts are the easiest ones for viewers to navigate while actually being able to take in the information that the site is presenting. Most professional web designers have mastered using whitespace (areas without content) to help emphasise other important parts of the site and other information that needs to be highlighted. For individuals with slightly less experience, the best practice is to limit the amount of embellishments that are included when designing the site. It can be incredibly easy to go overboard with amazing decorations and graphics; new designers need to keep in mind that they should only use one or two intricate elements to make sure that they are not introducing too many design elements to the site and taking the focus away from the purpose of the page.

Tip #3: Make it Convenient

Loading a site with a massive amount of graphics, scripts, and flash files can make a site more visually appealing or entertaining but will increase the amount of time it takes to load the site. To make sure that site visitors are not getting frustrated and/or bored with the amount of time it takes to load a site, web designers should cut down on the amount of graphics and other items that take more time to load. Additionally, designers should learn the best ways to use the coding language they are writing the site in; optimizing the code can help to minimise the amount of time it takes to load and site, which makes visitors much more interested in visiting the site again and again.

Tip #4: Plan Ahead

Web designers should sit down with a white board or another thought-organising medium and plan every aspect of the site that they will be designing down to the tiniest aspect. It can seem tedious and trivial, but this putting this kind of forethought into a webpage can make the design process much smoother than it would be to try to work things out as the design progresses. A lot of designers overlook this and end up regretting it after they get started with the design.

Tip #5:

It is incredibly important for designers to stay up to date with current trends in web design; web page viewers notice the “new” and “cool” web designs and are drawn to sites that make an effort to adapt to the changing times. There is an enormous amount of sources available online who evaluate and map out current trends in web design. Additionally, a lot of designers are proud of their work and create tutorials that can help fellow designers understand their process for designing sites. Some current trends in web design are oversized logos and headers, sketched and hand-drawn design work, huge images, interactive designs, and many more.