Must Have Web Design Skills for 2018 Share: Date Published 30 July 2018 Categories Blog Reading Time 4-Minute Read Learning about this is an excellent first step in your quest to learn great web design techniques. If you are ready, start with these tips below that can help. Coding If you’re designing a website, make sure the code you write has a valid HTML+CSS. Although most browsers can make sense of code that isn’t valid, it could be rendered correctly or incorrectly. Valid code will render the same way most of the time in modern browsers. You can check the validity of your HTML code with an HTML validator. User Friendliness Keep your pages to a reasonable length. Add content through new pages on your site, instead of tacking it on to the end of a home page. For the most part, readers are hesitant to keep going on a page that seems to scroll on forever. If you must have a lot of content on one page, include hyperlinks at the top and in sections throughout the page. This allows users to navigate through the available content without excessive scrolling. Alt-Tags Use ALT tags whenever possible. These helpful tags describe an image to a viewer, assisting the visually impaired, as well as those who prefer to browse without images. As an added bonus, some search engines include these tags in their rankings, so you may get a boost by using them. Basic Knowledge About SEO When designing your site, try to come up with three or four keywords that you expect users to input into search engines as they try to find your page. These keywords should then be repeated frequently throughout the title, page body and description meta tag. This will make it easier for users to locate your site on the web. Always Keep Learning Learn as much as you can about the various forms of html, as the html is crucial to web design. When you learn about html go ahead and make a couple of pages that are sort of filled with the information that you want to add to any of the sites you plan on working on. Invest in a library of books which will aid you in learning the field of web design. Start out simple by purchasing books that are in line with your level of expertise, then gradually upgrade. Videos If you put videos on your site, make sure to optimize them so that people with slower connections can view them. A video that is converted to 5,000 kb/s will load faster on some computers, but it might be faster than some Internet connections allow for. You will end up giving them a video that spools and buffers constantly, and the viewing experience will be quite slow. Code Duplication Consider duplicating code you already have to create new pages for your site. Rather than generating a HTML code for all pages, just copy the main portion of the code, change it when it’s needed, and save the code every time. Keep a master copy of your code and adapt it to your different pages. Ability To Select Right Typography Keep your font type simple on your website. Arial or Times New Roman is perfect for any website. You don’t need to get carried away with bubble letters or illegible chicken wings. Exotic fonts might seem cool to you, but your visitors are going to have a tough time reading your site. Ability To Check You can see if your website is interesting by checking the statistics of it. You will be able to tell who is visiting your site and which pages they’re spending the most time on. This will help you know where you need to update and highlight to keep your visitors engaged. CSS Coding It can be helpful to become a CSS (cascading style sheet) expert. While HTML is important, CSS is even more important. It acts as a reference to help your site stay consistent across multiple pages. This can make it easier to change your website globally. You can change the basic elements of every page of your site with just a few lines of code. Ability To Check When you decide to build a site, make it revolve around the needs of your target audience. You want things like your font, layout and overall theme to align with the interests of those who are going to visit your site, so that they are interested in coming back to your site after their initial visit. After reading the information located above, you are ready to begin designing your own website. It’s a skill you have to continue to practice and hone, of course. Keep these tips in mind as you set out to design your own professional looking website.