You need to be at the top of the game in web design. Learn more about what is important, including the right frame of mind. The advice presented here will help you build an impressive website with very little aggravation on your part.

Always mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. These files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer if the user does not have it.

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.

To help your website visitors easily navigate through your site, design it so that it becomes easy to find "stuff." When you have a simple site that makes it easy to locate information, you keep your visitors there much longer. If you make it difficult for them, then they will get frustrated and leave.

Free software is great to start with when you're getting into web design. Costly software is also available, but you can get good results with free tools since you are the main factor in the success of your site. Just look around a bit to locate the ones that will work best for what you need.

Avoid the overuse of different fonts when you are designing your website. Learn how to use generic fonts to make your site look more uniform. Lots of sites use typefaces like Verdana since it reads well in different sizes and colors.

When designing your site, try to come up with three or four keywords that you expect users to input into search engines as they try to find your page. These keywords should then be repeated frequently throughout the title, page body and description meta tag. This will make it easier for users to locate your site on the web.

The best web sites communicate a lot of information in a small amount of words. If you are long-winded, people will easily get bored and find another site that is more concise. Make sure any content is relevant and easy to understand - newspapers use an eighth grade reading level, which is the most common literacy level.

To help you create a website, you should learn HTML. Knowing HTML helps you understand how a website functions. When you understand how a website works, you can incorporate your own HTML code into your site. This helps you to easily correct changes without having to rely on outside programs to build your site. In other words, you have more control over your site's content.

Never bite off more than you can chew by attempting to design multiple sites at once. You should keep things simple by only working on one site at a time. Even if you do have some web design skills, you may get crossed up with your projects, or one of your sites may suffer neglect. Just take things one at a time.

Your host will likely have design tools that you can use for your basic layout. Don't rely on these tools entirely, however. Try to integrate your personality into the site by adding and tweaking things without just relying on dragging and dropping things your web host provides.

Development platforms build the code for you, however, they really are not as dependable as a regular text editor. What a platform does is help you paste the code onto features that you have made. It makes things simple, but it can create some bulky, messy code. To make things more error-free, working the old fashioned way, via a text editor, is the smarter approach.

If you are new to web design, you should start with a very basic layout. This allows you to modify the structure as you become more comfortable with design principles. This basic design will help you grasp the easy stuff, which will prepare you to tackle more advanced web design principles in time.

In summation, anyone that wants to get into web design can be, with the right information. Hopefully, these tips helped you understand what to focus on in your own design.