Given the numerous aspects of creating a good website, website design can be a contentious topic. You want your website to appear in search engines, preferably on page one, and you also want it to be geared toward your visitors so that they spend as much time as possible on it.
Web Design Tips
Most web designers will tell you that good web design takes a lot of work to get properly. There are numerous ways to reduce this time, but how can you assure that the design quality does not suffer due to time efficiency? Here are five web design strategies that help you save time while maintaining high quality.
1. Use website templates
Web designers commonly use this method to save time. There are a variety of templates available online, some of which are free and others that are not. This is a plug-and-play design strategy in which you just fill the various elements in the template with content and save a lot of time.
The disadvantage is that, while saving time, a website template is less customizable than other designs. To maintain a more customized approach while still using templates, it’s recommended that you have a variety of templates to pick from so that the sites you develop have various design options.
Read also: 6 Website Design Strategies
2. Include header and footer file for each page
This can be accomplished in various ways. For example, you can write a unique header and footer file with PHP and include it on each page. You can use a nested template in Dreamweaver to add headers and footers to your main template. To imitate a client-side included in raw HTML, use server-side includes or JavaScript.
Using these includes, you may save a lot of time by only editing one file instead of making edits on each page when you want to modify the header. These include tags aren’t only for headers and footers; they may be used for any component of your site that appears on multiple pages.
3. Make a code library
If you create many websites, you’ll probably want to use part of the code in multiple projects. You can quickly access these elements from the library by putting the various portions of code you use into a library of sorts. It’s sometimes only a matter of cutting and pasting to get the elements you need for your sites in place and save a lot of time. It’s similar to using a template (you could include your own templates in your library). It can, however, save other sorts of code, such as typical JavaScript code that you use frequently or a specific structure inside the site code that you like to utilize occasionally.
4. Use a web server
You can test code that requires a server (like PHP and SQL code) without putting it on the web by installing a web server locally. Making code changes and testing them immediately saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent saving, uploading, and trying new web design projects.
5. Find helpful tools
Every web designer has various needs and uses different tools, but it’s worth looking into the possibilities for solutions that can help you be more productive. It may be a Firefox extension (like the web developer toolbar), a specialized graphics editor, or even a web design professional you can regularly ask questions on a forum (gurus can often be some of the best resources). You can save time finding the tools and resources to help you with your design process.
When you use these 5 web design strategies to save time on your site development projects, you’ll be able to do many more jobs faster and be more productive.
If you are interested in even more web design-related articles and information from us here at Forums 2001, then we have a lot to choose from.