Having an effective web design for your site is extremely important if you're looking out to make a good impression on your target audience. Before your visitors can even absorb any real information about your site, they'll take in the look and design and form an instant opinion based on that. What follows are some key points that will enable you to design your website in a way that will make the right impression on your visitors.
Let's talk about usability and mention the virtues of using the spell checker for your content. Think about the impression you get from a site that has a lot of words with typos. There really is no excuse for messing this one up since a spell checker is so common. People are willing to forgive a misspelled word once in a great while, but after about three they may start to wonder. This is part of the deal when you are running an online business, and it actually is important.
Whether you opt for over or under the header, be sure to always slap the good old link back to home.
This could be the main graphic, the company logo or simply a link on the header that leads the visitor to the homepage upon clicking. Not including this on each page will just confuse your visitors as they search around a way to go back to the homepage. For example, let's take your website's navigation bar - it should be in the same place on each of your page, and not moved around. If you use a logo, the very often people will, or may, assume the logo link is the homepage link - but we would not always assume people know.
Use a Favicon: There are small things that make a big difference when it comes down to web design; one such thing is the Favicon or the 'favorite icon'. Favicons give you an easy way to give your website a more legitimate and high quality appearance. You'll be able to have your personal logo appear in the URL area. Besides that, the Favicon will also show up when somebody bookmarks your page, which adds to professionalism of your website and makes a good impression on the end user.
There are entire books written about website design, but you can discover enough so you can make your niche sites look quite nice. If you want your site to stand out from the rest, then ensure that you're working on strengthening the basic foundation.