All webmasters are website designers to an extent. Even if you use a professional web design company, then you will probably be designing it yourself to a degree as you make small tweaks and changes and as you will guide them through each stage of the design and advise on which features and style options you want to go with. Of course if you are responsible for the actual coding and creation of your site as well, then you will have even more of a say in how it turns out and will be completely responsible for how well received the layout and look of the site is.
As such then, the success of your website will often come down to just how good you are as a web designer and whether your vision for the site is one that your visitors will appreciate and that will translate to good sales. In order to improve your profits you need to improve your site – and in order to improve your site you need to improve yourself. Here we will look at how you can do that.
Learn
First of all there are plenty of skills that you should develop if you want to become better at designing and running a website. For instance you should make sure that you are able to code in all the relevant languages. You should already probably have a good basis in HTML for instance if you work online, but you can greatly improve your ability to design great looking sites by also learning PHP, Java and CSS. Even if you aren’t designing the sites yourself, understanding these languages can help you to make edits and tweaks and also help you to decide which things you want to request for your site and to better communicate with your web design team – which is surprisingly useful.
Browse
The more you look around the web at various site designs the better an idea you’ll get about what works as well as what you want for your own website. In other words then make sure that you are researching websites and looking at web designs and you will be better poised to oversee the construction of one that you can be proud of and that will make you some money.
Distance Yourself
One of the biggest problems we have as web designers generally is that we are too close to the subject matter and this causes us to make bad decisions. It’s like when you try to draw a portrait – apparently we find this difficult because we have certain expectations of how someone’s eyes and nose should look and particularly if we know them well and this then causes us to draw what we think should be there rather than what we see resulting in a mess. A good way to avoid this is to draw the face upside down so that we draw what we can see and not what we think should be there.
The same is true of a website, and if you have a very strong view of what you want your site to be like and what you want it to say then this can cause you to lose sight of what really looks good and what works. Learn then to look at the data and to listen to your website designers and market feedback rather than just doing what you think will be the right thing.
Todd Ramos is an expert web designer who works for a leading web design ct company. Todd loves SEO, hockey, swimming pools and studies various web development platforms sharing tips on smart website personalization techniques and improvising on structure and design.