Building a website is a crucial step for any business or personal project. Web development is complex, with the right approach and you can create an effective professional and mobile-friendly website which is easy to navigate and serve your business goals.
In this guide, we’ll discuss website development tips for beginners to build your website from scratch with a solid foundation or either improve an existing one.
Website Development Tips for Beginners
1. Plan Your Web Design & Choose the Right Platform
Setting your goals for the website will save you time, before you start coding, look and feel the planned structure of your website. Create a cohesive plan with its specifications and guidelines, select your target audience, and how you want users to interact with the website. To prevent design errors, take guidance from website visitors’ requirements which helps in building an effective structure.
Selecting the right platform is crucial for beginners, to build a well-structured website. There are countless platforms available in the market to establish a clear website without any need of extensive programming knowledge such as WordPress, Wix and Squarespace. They offer a range of tools which help you build your website easily; some platforms specialize in creating professional websites for small businesses or others are ideal for blogs or offer a website builder with drag-and-drop functionality.
2. Understand Your Target Audience & Prioritize User-Friendly Design
Understanding your target audience is important in the development process, a website is created through understanding their needs. Website’s design decisions consist of user expectations and business goals, you should always prioritize design decisions accordingly in sync with what your website visitors want to accomplish when they interact with the website.
One of the key website design tips includes a user-friendly website that should be easy to navigate your site with a clear structure. Avoid cluttering your web pages with too many design elements which prevent overcrowding, use white space to enhance readability, and if possible, guide your users for better content flow, from one section to another.
Visitors stay and explore generally if your website is easier to use, designed better or visually appealing. Some web design tips include, a clear hierarchy to organize and build intuitive navigation menus for your overall user experience, apply color schemes and brand colors that align with your brand identity.
3. Improve Your Website Design: Navigation and Structure
Users should be able to quickly find the information, they’re looking for an easy to navigate website with clear labelled menus. Keep the website navigation simple and consistent throughout the website, including important links at the footer of your site such as contact details to assist visitors. Users, who are browsing a website should be able to find important pages, links or navigation menus, ideally which should be at the top or side of your homepage.
4. Use Clear Headings and Subheadings
Appropriate headings and subheadings, enhances readability and also improves search engine optimization (SEO). Consider using short paragraphs, and bullet points as it makes it easy to read and concise, guiding the reader’s eye. Website content should be well structured into digestible chunks by using subheadings, which makes it easier for users to scan through the page. Headings and subheadings help search engines understand the structure of your content.
To improve readability, choose a typeface that supports the overall website with a balanced style and legibility. Avoid overly decorative fonts, and use a combination of heading and body text fonts which makes it look creative and offer a more appealing user experience with clean, modern text. Avoid cluttering, prioritize readability with font choices as it also plays a significant role.
5. Optimize Your Website for Speed
An excellent user experience depends on website load time, users get frustrated with a slow loading website and leave before it even loads. Enabling small steps to optimize your site such as browser caching, and compressing large files improves the functionality and user experience. This can significantly hurt your search engine rankings, minimize CSS, JavaScript and HTML files and reduce image sizes without sacrificing quality will speed up the performance and offer a fast-loading experience of your page that can help retain visitors. Optimization of media files and caching should be a priority, making visitors retain, explore and engage with your content.
6. Test Functionality on Different Platforms
Testing the functionality of websites on different platforms is crucial, users use different browsers or devices. When creating an effective website, ensure that your site works well on different devices and browsers, providing a seamless experience across all platforms. Testing every aspect of your website functions on multiple browsers and mobile devices guarantees a seamless experience. Before your website goes live, ensure all buttons, forms, important links and website speed work properly.
Call-to-action (CTAs) offer convenient options to take desired actions, ensuring that your CTAs are visible and compelling. Make them larger and place them on every page or home page of your website if necessary, so users can contact your business, subscribe to a newsletter or make a purchase easily. To make it more accessible, include alt text for images which provide context for search engine optimization and alt text help increase your visibility.
7. Learn and Adapt from Freelance Web Designers
Access the internet, consider learning from experienced freelance web designers, can get you some useful insights and website tips. Look through online tutorials to improve the design of your website, and avoid common design mistakes such as using hard to read fonts, overloading with too many media files, not putting important content at the top, and add keyboard navigation options.
Test your website look on various mobile devices, desktop and adjust its layout accordingly. Developer use whitespace around text which makes it easier for visitors to focus on absolute important content. Mobile-friendly version of your site, with a clean and professional look allow visitors to navigate your website with any browser or device.
Conclusion
These website development tips and tricks are for website building from scratch, focus on user-friendly design and optimize for speed and accessibility. Create a website which is mobile-friendly that meets your business goals, avoid common pitfalls and optimize for SEO. As you continue your web development journey, maintain consistency in learning and improving your plans. Create a website which provides an exceptional user experience, mobile-friendly and plan your structure beforehand.