Graphic Design

Gee where do I begin with this post? The traps of designing your own website or the tips of do it yourself web page design. Either way I need to get some of this stuff written down into this post and out of my head so I can move on and stop thinking about this stuff.

This post is for all those do it yourself website builders that spend a lot of their valuable time designing their own websites to what they hope will be appealing to the general online public and will hopefully get people to keep coming back to their sites.

I deal mostly with blogs and specifically the WordPress blogs because they are so user friendly and one of the easiest platforms to make personal website tweaks to. The basics of what you will need to know are a little bit of CSS coding for coloring and template format changing as well as some basic html coding again to play around with the templates and to add your own personal flair to each site that you build.

All of the tips and traps that I will write about in this post are merely me relaying information based on my own personal experience with building websites over the last three years. The first thing I would recommend to anyone that is brave enough to take on designing your own website is to have a way of tracking your changes. Other wise how will you ever know what is working and what is not? I use the Google analytic stat tracker because it offers a lot of customization but also because it is free

Simple Website Design

Some stats that you may want to learn to keep an eye on are things like the time spent on pages, the bounce rate and the average pages viewed by your visitors. You would be surprised how much these things can fluctuate based on some graphical design changes to your site. So step number one before you start making changes is to make sure you have some sort of tracking system so you don’t waste your time or money in some cases.

Learn to include your navigational layout a priority for your site and make those directions clear for your users. I once tried to use a fancy new navi menu on a page that usually got some pretty good traffic moving through it to other pages on the site until I made the change to the navigational design. It brought the traffic to a dreadful halt even though it looked pretty it ended up costing me a lot of flow to other places.

So try and keep your site functional and clear, let’s face it the majority of internet surfers have been programmed over the years to expect a certain look to navigational links to other sites. So don’t try to re invent the wheel when it comes to navigation just use what works and save yourself some time.

I like to tinker with sites on the coding side of things. Generally I find a template that looks good, download it to my site and start tweaking the colors and the layout to get it just the way I like it. You would be amazed how addictive it can be to make template changes and layouts to sites. Most of the time I get too carried away with making changes and loose focus of the fact that it can be the prettiest site anyone has ever seen but if I don’t get back to writing new content for the  site none of that hard work will matter much.

I would almost recommend to people that don’t tweak websites but feel like they want to, to not do it and just leave it alone. Like I said it can become an addictive habit that will end up wasting a lot of your time which if you are the only one working on this site and you are responsible for all aspects of the site.

Your time will be better spent on the content and the best example I could give your for that argument are sites like Google and Yahoo which are not the prettiest graphically designed sites you have ever seen but they are functional and the most popular in the world which is something you can not argue with. So keep it simple people it’s what works when it comes to do it yourself website designs.