How to focus your Web Design on Performance

With website design becoming an increasingly popular career path, new designers are now starting to focus more on the way websites look.

If they are to find more common success however with their projects, they will need to try and find a balance between creating a site that performs well and a site that is user-friendly.

Here we will look at ways you can make your latest website more user-friendly so then visitors are able to interact with the site with positive effect.

Start With Symmetrical Code

When you first start getting to grips with designing a website, it can all seem quite overwhelming. You can be looking at lines and lines of HTML and CSS code for hours without making any progress and it can feel like you’re never going to meet your deadline for getting the website online.

The important thing to do is avoid panicking. As you get more and more experienced, you will be able to deal with coding easily so then you can plan things in advance so then you do not get caught out. Until then however, it is a good idea to start off with symmetrical coding when you are using HTML and CSS. By doing this you can then turn your attention to figuring out how the coding should be laid out so then it is flexible, regardless of its size.

Just make sure that you run regular tests at this stage. Testing is a very important part of making sure that usability is at its highest level, so try and keep and eye on everything all the time. If things are working well, then you can start to move on to other things.

Ensure Loading Times Are Consistent

This is one of the most important issues when it comes to the performance of a website. It has been found that a slow loading web page can alter the mood of user quite quickly. People come to the internet because they want to be able to get hold of information quickly. If they are held up for longer than they want to wait by a slow loading website, then they will quickly move on to something else. This is something that can really harm your site’s search engine ranking as Google have now started taking the bounce rate of websites seriously.

If you do have pages that seem to be taking far too long to load, then there are a few things you can do in order to fix that. The first thing you can do is try and reduce the amount of content you have on a particular page. Try and cut the word count of a particular piece of content down and then see if that is able to improve the loading time. If that does not help, then it could be that the images or videos that are on the pages are slowing things down. If that is the case, then you should try and reduce the amount of data that the images use. As for videos, you could remove them completely and instead use hyperlinks, but that is something you should only do if you are comfortable with people leaving your site in order to watch it.

It can be a little fiddly at first to get everything loading exactly the way you want it to, but if you are willing to spend a little time to get everything right, then you should find your website performing a lot better very quickly.

Plan Ahead

When you are undertaking a project like designing a website, it is very important that you plan ahead in whatever way you can. Problems can arise at any point, so you need to make sure that you have plans and other aspects of the project in motion so then you can solve problems quickly and get everything back on track.

Website design involves managing a large number of moving parts, so it’s important that you stay on top of them. The only way to really do this is to plan how you will approach each task in advance so then you have a clear idea what to expect. Try and think about all the detail that will go into your project. Think about certain animations, or how the menu will look, or even what structure you will use for the written content and how the look and feel of the site with compliment it. If you are able to make sure that everything is covered, then you should be able to get through a project with relative ease.

Use Experts When Necessary

There is nothing wrong with getting hold of some additional help with a project, particularly if you are new to web design. If you feel you are struggling with something, or you just want a little advice about something specific, then you should get in touch with a local web designer and ask for their advice. Finding one that is local is not that difficult. Just make sure that you use relevant terms in a search engine. For example, if you live in Waterford then you can search for, ‘designing websites in Waterford’ in order to find a web designer that is near your location.