If you’ve ever wanted to design a website, you know how daunting the prospect is. Creating an online identity is intimidating, even if you’re doing it for somebody else. To do a good job of creating a website, you need some basic information, and that is what we present here.

When you are creating graphics or photos for your website, be sure to keep the file size small. If your graphics are too large, your page will load slowly and your visitors will leave. You can find many free or inexpensive graphics programs online that will optimize your images before you load them to your website.

Make certain that visitors have a way to search for a particular topic on your site. If visitors want something specific, they will immediately scan for a search function. If this option is unavailable, they may leave the site for one that allows a search. You should put this search box on the top of your page, preferably the right side. This is where many visitors look for it.

Minimize your web page’s size. Not all Internet users have fast connection speeds, and the longer your site takes to load, the less interest they will have. You don’t need visitors having pages get stuck every time they load because they may just leave your site and not return.

Always give viewers the option to cancel a current action. This could be a form that they have been filling out, registering for newsletters or emails, or even browsing the website for certain topics or archives. If you don’t let visitors back out of an incomplete action, it can be perceived as forcing them to do something, which will probably make them go elsewhere.

Use images wisely. Bitmap images do not tend to fare well for internet use, and some GIFs do not work well with lots of color. Image size is important as well, as larger images may make your viewers have to wait for them to download. Choose smaller images, and use them sparingly to make your site more manageable.

To help your web pages load quickly, you should compress all the images on the website page. If you have images that are compressed then pages will load much faster. Nothing is more frustrating to viewers than waiting for a 250k graphic to load when it should really only be 20k.

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.

Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, you are probably itching to go out there and design a killer website. Armed with the knowledge that you’ve gotten from this article, you should be able to do just that. Use this information and your best instincts to design the site of your dreams.