In the current times, when there are lots of beautiful websites, you may think of having your own beautiful and unique website created. Some may decide to hire a developer while others look toward free websites. You may want a unique and appealing design for your visitors. But with the limited knowledge about web designing, you may compromise with your wishes. If you hire some web designing agency, sometimes they just give you a template website with little modifications. They just edit the template a little and paste your content and charge you hefty fees for that. Result- you do not get a unique and attractive website as you desired. What could be the solution then? Well, you may opt for custom web design, it’s a procedure in which a website is designed from scratch as per your needs.
There is one more term which may be beneficial for you- pay monthly websites. If you’ve not heard about this then let me clear – with web design pay monthly option, you only need to pay a certain small fee on monthly basis and it includes hosting, design and development costs, maintenance, etc. Many web design service providers offer pay monthly website, you can choose one of those to start your own site without paying for upfront web design and development cost.
The main motto of this article is to provide your some tips to consider while doing custom web design. These tips may aid you to design perfectly responsive websites for your clients.
1. Minimize Use of Flash Content
It’s quite popular to have flash menu and slideshow in the website, as it gives dynamic and attractive look to your website. But, it is neither SEO friendly, nor quick responsive. It takes higher time to load your web page in comparison to simple HTML coded page. So you should limit the use of Flash content, try to use other alternate technologies like jQuery and Silverlight to have Flash like contents but with better responsiveness.
2. Use Compressed Images
The main reason behind long loading time of websites is use of lots of images. High quality and big size images take a higher time to load in comparison to text based content. If it’s possible avoid the images or use any third party tool to compress the images before uploading to the website. It reduces the size of images and the response time as well. Another way to cut short the load time is to always specify the size of the image in HTML code, it responses quickly to the server.
3. Clean up your Code
Nasty code always brings troubles; try to clean up your HTML code before uploading it on live server. Try to remove white spaces, unnecessary tags, spaces from the code and make it easily readable to help out easy bug finding. Remember to use defaults for tags or remove them wherever possible.
4. Use Cascading Style Sheet
It is modern approach to use CSS for styling websites; in traditional format designers used to have table form to arrange the content of website. Table format take time to load page in the browser as table styling increases actual page size. To overcome this issue CSS is a better approach, as all the styling rules resides in a tiny file which is loaded once at the time of request. Page size gets reduced dramatically hence lesser page loading time.
5. Reduce HTTP Requests
We use many third party website contents on our website, whether to show an image, audio or video from YouTube. These external website contents generate different HTTP requests each time page gets loaded. These HTTP requests increase the loading time of web page and adversely affect the responsiveness of your website. Try to limit these outer resources and use only optimized contents on your website.
Conclusion
Above mentioned tips are very useful for web designers who do custom web designs, you can increase web design response rate without affecting the design of your website. Your overall approach must be of designing beautiful website with higher response rate to satisfy your clients.
