Web design
Web design covers the look and feel of your site and how to build the pages.
Where and how to get content for your pages is discussed in
Web content. Here we assume that you know what the content of each page will
be, but you need a method to build the page offline and then get it onto your
website.
How do you get all the pages of your site to look like they belong together.
How do you ensure that visitors can move easily between different pages on your
site. This is what web design is all about.
The design of the site has no effect on SEO or getting traffic to your site
but it does affect the quality of the visitor's experience. Movement between
pages must be easy. It must be very clear to the visitors which page they are
on, and how to get back to where they were without having to use the back
button. Each page should have a link back to the home page.
Remember that the more complex your pages the slower they will load. Filling
pages with animated fancy graphics might look cool to some but slow loading
pages are very off-putting to so if don't want barriers to entry make it simple.
Movement between pages on a site is controlled by a navigation system.
This usually takes the form of a menu system either along the top of the page or
down the side. By clicking on the menu item of choice you are directed to the
relevant page. Menus can take different forms. The basic menu displays all
possible options at all times i.e what you see is all there is. Others only
display the main options until you click on one of these main options which then
opens a drop-down box offering further choices. These are known as drop-down
menus.
Knowing HTML is an advantage in web design but there are enough tools
available today that facilitate the creation of web sites without HTML
knowledge. Amongst the more popular are FrontPage and DreamWeaver. Another
option is to purchase a website template with the design you desire. A third
option is to use a simple text editor like Notepad but this is very restrictive
and only suitable for very basic web pages.
Once your page is built you need to upload it to a server before it will be
available online. To do this you need FTP (File transfer protocol) software like
WS_FTP Pro.