Designing a great site, a step by step guide, takes a lot of work. If you are not prepared, dealing with all the minutiae can be quite daunting. The tips below will help you tackle this challenge.

Always mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. These files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer if the user does not have it.

Test your site to see if the major translation services work properly when translating your site. Some sites receive many international visitors, and these visitors sometimes use services like BabelFish and Google Translate to translate the text to their language. Certain web design problems, especially poor server side code, can break these services.

Use a descriptive title. Many site owners forget to name their pages, or name them something generic, such as “Welcome Page.” Search engines do use title descriptions in their rankings, so make sure you are as descriptive as possible, without going overboard. Make sure it is usable for your viewers and the search engines.

Personalize your site. Your clients want to feel comfortable with you, so use testimonials from trusted customers, as well as photographs of people. Building trust with your customers is very important, so be sure to let them know you personally care about the product or service you are providing them.

To help keep your site visitors happy, do not underline words. Underline words on the internet signifies that the word is a clickable link. If you have too many words on your pages that are underlined with being clickable links, then your visitors will be frustrated after continuously trying to click on them.

When designing your site, try to come up with three or four keywords that you expect users to input into search engines as they try to find your page. These keywords should then be repeated frequently throughout the title, page body and description meta tag. This will make it easier for users to locate your site on the web.

To help you design a website that is free of clutter, do not include any scrolling text on your site. Websites that have things constantly moving back and forth on the screen is really distracting to the visitor. Not only is this distracting and annoying, it screams unprofessional and will cause your visitors to leave quickly.

Do not use blinking, scrolling text or other animations. Also, steer clear of sounds or music that plays automatically. All of these things are distracting to users and provide nothing of value. In addition, connection speeds vary from one site visitor to the next, and everyone does not have the same speed. Those users with slower connections will resent the slow-loading elements of your site.

Use custom error pages to make your site more informative. For instance, if you want people to report dead links on your site, either put a server-side script on your 404 page or have a form or email address that visitors can use to report the error. You should have custom pages for 403, 404, and 500 errors, at the very least.

Never bite off more than you can chew by attempting to design multiple sites at once. You should keep things simple by only working on one site at a time. Even if you do have some web design skills, you may get crossed up with your projects, or one of your sites may suffer neglect. Just take things one at a time.

Even if you know how to design sites for the web you still have much to learn. Everyone today is using mobile devices so this means that there is a higher demand for making sites mobile compatible. Start learning how to build mobile sites so that you’re knowledgable of how to build various types of websites.

Always utilize media and content that is both relative to your site’s goal, but also interesting to the potential consumers who will be viewing your site. A site that has relative info, but that is not interesting, won’t captivate its audience. A website that uses fun, but non-relative information, will captivate the wrong audience. Both methods equal profits that you are losing.

If user or customer agreements are found on our website, speak plainly in them, avoiding legal jargon as much as possible. You want your customers to feel like they know what is going on and being said. Legal jargon will confuse your customers, and it will make them uneasy about your site.

The way to start web design is to begin with the basics and not rush to learn everything in one day. As you get the hang of things, you will see your site slowly start to improve. Refer to these tips as needed moving forward.