With all the focus on creating content and building up links, web design is often relegated to one of the unappreciated corners of the site builder's list of tasks. In reality, though, it's one of the most important aspects of site building. Not only will effective site design make your pages look pretty, they could also attract new visitors and improve conversion. That beats out the dinky uncertainties of focusing on SEO any day.

Use the Site Builder

Most web hosting companies nowadays also feature one kind or another of a simple website builder utility. Often a very basic device, it does give you the ability to give some flow and coherence to all your content without having to know a single tag of HTML.

For most of the sites that do offer a site builder, their utility is limited just some very basic web design tools. Formatting, frames and image manipulation are some of the more typical features that you could reasonably expect from those utilities. It might not sound like much, but it's extremely useful if you don't have the time or ability to write HTML.

Reduce Unnecessary Clutter

As much as the idea of placing random glitter and graphics on your site appeals to you, the tenets of effective web design dictates that you do exactly the opposite. The best designs aren't necessarily the ones that have so much glitz and glamor, but the ones that can give the viewer all the important information in the shortest time.

Remember that everything you put into your site's web design counts as data; visitors will end up downloading that data whenever they access their site. Overdoing the designs will inevitably mean longer loading times without increasing the amount of viewable items. That just ends up reducing the quality of the overall visitor experience.

Don't Expect Too Much

From the site builder, that is. In the same vein as the previous point on reducing clutter, you also shouldn't expect the basic web design utility from your web host to have all sorts of advanced features. Whenever you use the provided site building tools, stick to basic designs because that's the kind of web design that those utilities were optimized for.

Imposing a too-fancy design on a too-simple site building utility usually just results in the utility's generating convoluted code that takes more time for browsers to load. If you've got a very particular and visually demanding design in mind, you might be better off paying for professional web design services.

Stick to Basics

Most websites nowadays rely heavily on graphics to get the point across. From product images to graphical site maps, pictures form a large part of contemporary web design. But this doesn't mean that you should let go of old traditions, either.

It's still a good idea to put text components into your design, from alt text content to an all-text version of your site map. Especially now that mobile phone web browsing is so common, it's important to always give visitors the low-bandwidth option for viewing your pages. At the same time, adding that textual backup counts as copy, which can then be seen by the search engines to boost your site's visibility.

As you can see, there's much more to effective web design than just picking out pretty templates and filling them with whatever strikes your fancy. If you want your site to succeed, you have to remember to optimize your design not just for the search engines but for the people who'll be viewing your site as well.

Take care of all your webhosting and web design needs at Discount Domains UK! After purchasing your hosting plan, you can go straight to our site builder and web design tools to get your site up and running as soon as possible.