Posted by on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 10:21 am.
Improving your website design skills can mean all the difference for boosting your potential profitability, whether for your company or for yourself.
I’ve found that with website design skills, making a few minor changes really helped to streamline the way that I developed in the field.
1. Code your designs from scratch
With the amount of freely available open source templates available on the web, it’s very easy to use a template or layout and adjust it to meet the needs of your design.
I would certainly recommend that you start each project with a blank xhtml document and a blank css document. You will ultimately generate more concise code and will enhance your understanding and ability with CSS.
2. Use PHP Includes for your Website
Includes are basically using a php file to contain areas of your code which are common to more than one, if not all pages. Using php includes where possible to form a template, will seriously cut down the amount time required to make changes both during the development stage and after.
Dreamweaver templates, offer us another solutions to this problem, but without doubt is a more cumbersome option, particularly when uploading all pages after a required change has been made.
3. Structure Your Website Files
Keeping a great track of all of your project files within a formatted structure will allow you to easily navigate files from design files to the main website structure.
By maintaining this, you make it very easy to approach future edits whether they are by you, a member of your team or any other website designer.
4. Manage the Design Project
Seemingly rather obvious, the efficient management of your projects will indeed ensure that your website design projects run smoothly. Ensuring that your fully visual homepage prototype is signed off by the client before entering the development stage, will avoid the project changing direction, and will ultimately give the client an accurate indication what the finished homepage will look like.
5. W3C compliance
The world wide web consortium is the governing body responsible for providing standards for the website design industry. There is nothing that says your website has to comply with these standards, but there are certainly beneficial reason why you should.
Google takes into consideration whether or not your code is valid by w3c standards, and indeed looks for many of the same characteristics when creating the rankings.
Channel
on December 2nd, 2009 Says:
Planning the website properly at the start is very important and can save a lot of time on overall project time scale. It is also improtant to involve the client as much as possible from the start. As a web designer I have realised that a majority of my time goes in amednments and changes as opposed the initial design itself. While changes will always be there and are a fact of life, I feel better management of the project can lead to considerable benefits.