Web Design Best Practices – How to Create Fast Websites

Probably the first and foremost priority of a web designer is to create a website that does not load slowly.In web composition, there is by all accounts a reverse connection between tasteful level and improved usefulness. However, being able to express creativity without sacrificing the loading speed of a site is a quality that sets skilled web designers like LinkHelpers from mere “WYSIWYG users”.

Here are tips on how to build a great-looking but fast-loading website:

Keep the number of images on a page to a minimum. Images, along with other media content such as videos and sound, make up for a large percentage of a website’s download speed. Though images enhance a page’s visual and oftentimes informational quality, the phrase “less is more” will still hold true for most cases. Use images only when they aid in delivering the information you want to deliver.

Optimize your images for the web. Make sure the images you use are in JPEG, GIF or PNG format. How do you choose? Use JPEG for photographs and images with full colors and smooth tones. GIF and PNG are good for flat-color images or art such as logos, buttons, icons or cartoons. When creating images for your website make sure to set their resolutions to 72dpi (dots per inch).

Use tables the right way. Oftentimes, web designers use tables to lay out their websites. This is bad web design practice and should be avoided at all costs. Tables are best for presenting tabular data not for making sure your columns have equal height.

The reason why there are a lot of designers use tables for laying out websites is because tables load fast. Sure they load fast but in order to make lay out a website using tables, you will need to use NESTED tables. Nested tables load slowly because a browser has to “read” the entire code to find out where the table ends before rendering it for display.

Sparingly use animated GIFs. Avoid using animated GIFs unless it’s necessary. Since they are made up of graphic frames, they take a long time to load or render in a browser. If you need to use animated GIFs to draw your users’ attention to an important part of the site (i.e. to alert them of newly-added articles) keep the images tiny.

Keep your page size under 30kb. Anything above that will load very slowly for people with non-broadband internet connections. This “page weight” includes your page’s text, images (including backgrounds) and media components such as sound and video

These are just a few of the many ways you can optimize your website for speed. Like I said, anyone with a WYSIWYG editor such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Dreamweaver can create beautiful websites but it takes a talented web designer to be able to strike a balance between the aesthetic qualities of a website and its loading speed.