Perfecting your web design

Like products, websites have to be easy to use as well as attractive. So, once you have completed your web design, it’s vital to get real people to test it. Larger websites often do user testing with wireframing of their early web design jobs. A wireframe is a very simple prototype of a web page showing the basic layout without any of the colours or images that will end up showing the final web design picture.

Testing how people use wireframes is an excellent way of identifying any usability problems in the web design early on rather than waiting until the website has been launched. Once you have sketched your ideas and decided which ones to try out, you are ready to open your web design program. Photoshop is the web design program that many web designers use to create the graphics for their websites. Basically, you draw your website with the help of a web design program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro before coding it with CSS, HTML or PHP.

One of the big advantages of designing websites this way is that you can get the web design looking exactly how you want it. Designs for websites that have been done in Photoshop are called treatments or mockups. Usually, a web designer will create two or three treatments for a website and then show them to the website owner, who chooses the best. If you are making the web design for yourself, then you could show the treatments to a friend or a member of your family. Often, you may find that you will want to make changes to your web design in order to improve it. Most treatments go through different versions before they are perfected to the ultimate web design layout.

Moreover, it’s much easier to make changes to a web design in Photoshop than it would be using HTML. Therefore, with the aid of the web design program of your choice, you could finalise the look and feel of your current design. Making changes will be much harder and could be more expensive if you leave them pending until the end of the project. Showing your web design to some potential customers can always be a wise thing to do. With this done, you will have an idea about what people think of your web design. Through feedbacks received, you can then enhance your web design so that it helps the website meet its goals.

Websites are coded using HTML, which is a fairly simple computer language made up of tags. In their simplest forms, tags are ways to add extra information to the text. For example you can add an h1 tag to some text if it’s the page heading or you could add an tag to some text to turn it to a link. This was fine to use in web design in the days when the pages were only created by academics to share their latest discoveries. But if you are creating the web design for a modern website, you would probably want it to look more attractive.
----------

Sanjou is the website design articles author at one of the leading website design company in the UK.