When you first get into web design, you’ve acquired a whole host of new skills and you’re ready for the big, crappy world of freelancing. You need a website that declares “I am the best; choose me to do your job” as the best option. That’s why you need everything you’ve learned over the past few months or even years to do something like this. After two months of hard work, you have completed your masterpiece. You look at it every day to see if other people like it as much as when they first saw it.
Talking to people in the industry will tear your website apart and tell you it’s a mess and meaningless. At first you will find them offensive, but over time you will understand what they mean.
After all this, my “masterpiece” wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t fun. Even if they are demanding, industry professionals have a wealth of knowledge and experience to help you succeed. For your own safety and the benefit of your visitors, here are some tips to keep in mind when building a new site.
Page size and download time
Many people now have broadband, but it is not universal. According to a recent poll, about 40% of people still use 56k to access the internet. Most users leave a site that doesn’t load in seconds, so try to keep loading times as short as possible. To achieve this, images should be kept to a minimum and design should be done in divs, not tables.
You should also reduce the amount of external code on the page, which means using the entire external CSS, rather than messing around with random Flash or Java code for fun. These scripts can produce amazing results, but they can also upset visitors and potential customers and slow down pages.
In general, valid code, when loaded, is more efficient than invalid code. Not only that, many higher level clients look for W3C compliance in your work; it shows your care and skills and also makes your website eligible for listing in special compliance directories
Cheap Hosting and email
Having a good website is only half the battle; you should always look professional. A domain name must be registered on both your website and your email account. At first, free hosting may seem like a good idea, but your customers may find it unprofessional and stingy, making you look like a hobbyist.
You may not be able to build your website the way you want because free hosting has many ad and script limitations.
Block Right Click
I can’t keep up with how many new designer websites I’ve seen. In my opinion, this is one of the least valuable things you can do on the internet these days. Not only does it annoy everyone who sees it. It would be naive to assume that right-clicking is reserved for saving images; right-click menus in modern browsers offer thousands of options, including highlighting websites. It also doesn’t stop people from stealing photos.
Music in Background
Inexperienced web designers often make this mistake if they use a lot of Flash. Do you really believe that your website is so important that you should use their computer’s audio output to protect it? What if they are spread across many different websites? What if they open another window with music or video?
Don’t put background music on your portfolio page, you don’t have to.
Analytics
Visitors don’t need to be involved in the process of monitoring and targeting your traffic. Invisible click counters can negatively affect your site’s ranking in the search engines. If possible, use an external solution such as Google Analytics or AWS Stats instead of embedding these scripts in your site.
Avoid these mistakes and you will be one step ahead of many other new and experienced web designers. Don’t forget to keep up to date with the latest trends in the web design market, this is always the best way to start a business and build a successful web design agency.