Web design for beginners

Here are a few useful tips for beginners who are thinking of entering the world of web design:

The first and most important step is to define your audience and their needs.

Defining the purpose and objectives of your website should be your first step. Focus on what you want your website to achieve. Create a profile of your intended audience and try to understand their needs and tastes, and design the site with them at the forefront of your mind at all times.

In order to make your content easy for your intended audience to navigate, make sure the links to the main sections of your website are easily visible from each web page. You want to invite people to view as many pages of your site as possible, so make it easy for them to find each page.

If there’s a lot of content, split it up into several different pages so your viewer doesn’t have to digest too much information on one page.

Keep text simple and to the point, and make sure grammar is correct – check and check again to avoid looking unprofessional. Text is more difficult to read on screen than in printed media, so it’s crucial get your message across in a succinct and easy to understand way.

Learning the basics of html – even if you are using WYSIWYG software Front Page or Dreamweaver - will help you gain an understanding of how a web page in built, and deal with problems you encounter using the software. A good beginner’s guide to html can be found at: http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/

Try and stay away from tables, and create the pages using layers (divs) and cascading style sheets (CSS).

Creating a balanced colour palette from which to choose your website colour scheme will help you to create a professional looking website. Bright clashing colours scream amateur.

If you are creating a website for a company with a logo, start here. Upload the logo to your host server and go to a colour palette website such as (http://www.colorhunter.com) to create a palette, from which you can choose colours for the main banner, buttons and text rollovers etc.

And keep things simple and uncluttered - empty space makes colours stand out and text easier to read.

Use design to highlight functionality. For example; using gradients on button also helps make them seem more ‘button like’, different coloured mouse over text draws attention to links.

Hope you find these tips useful. Hope you find these tips useful. For more information, you can view the full web design tips article here.