Most people don’t build cars from scratch. Skip the real life work and design websites instead. It takes learning a little bit about how they’re made, and you’ll find that you can design a site soon enough to bring in visitors to your new site. The information below will give you some excellent advice about basic web design.

Be sure to view your website designs in all the popular web browsers. This will help you to make sure your site works for everyone. Make sure to research the browsers available. In addition, let someone who uses an operating system that differs from yours check the site for compatibility.

For multimedia presentations, take advantage of the new HTML5 standard. Although HTML5 isn’t quite as robust for animation and games as Flash, it has the advantage of working stably on mobile phone browsers, including those contained in Apple hardware. HTML5 is also quite a bit leaner than Flash, so load times will improve, as well.

Use JavaScript to include a custom font on your webpages. Libraries like Typekit and Google Web Fonts make it easy to include esoteric fonts on webpages, even if most visitors don’t have those fonts on their computers. It works by embedding the font itself into JavaScript so that it can be decoded by the client on the fly.

Wherever your logo appears on your site, you should accompany it with a complementary slogan or tagline. Ideally, this tagline should be catchy and informative, and should offer some basic summary of the purpose of your site or product offering. The combination of your logo and tagline should appear on every page to create a sense of cohesion.

You must always include the capability to search if you are working on a large website. Put in a search box in the right-hand corner up on top of the homepage, as this allows the site visitors to type in a single keyword that shows up anywhere on your site. If you need a search function, FreeFind and Google offer their services for your site.

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.

Minimize the amount of clicking or scrolling visitors must do to access information. The more a user has to click or scroll around to find the information they seek, the more likely they are to give up looking for it. Aim for having at least 400 words on every page of your site by combining pages that have content that falls below this number of words.

With these tips at your disposal, you can now get started with web design. Your eyes will open to the simplicity of it once you master the fundamentals. From that point, you can create visually appealing web sites everyone will enjoy. Just remember to use what you’ve learned above.