Have you ever gone to a site that was especially aesthetically pleasing? There are many key elements that can make or break your site. The tips here will teach you a few tricks about designing websites. Read on to learn all of the techniques that you can use.

Choose proper graphic for your web designs. Remember, bitmap images are huge and usually don’t work well, PNGs work fine. Use a GIF instead if the image contains over 256 colors and PNG for test buttons and screen shots. JPEG is a good choice for photographic images.

Color combinations are key in branding your website. You want to make sure that your text is easily visible against your background colors. It is generally agreed upon that dark text on a light background is the easiest to read. Don’t be afraid to ask a friend or colleague for their opinion of the color scheme.

Use shortcuts. In website creation, there are lots of shortcuts that will decrease the amount of time it takes to do things. HTML codes are one shortcut that allows you to fix things on your pages without the need to re-upload them.

Understand what you want your site to do. Research your subject before posting anything. Publishing inaccuracies and falsehoods will glean you a bad reputation, causing you to lose readers. To create a blog that draws visitors and keeps them interested, knowing what you are talking about is key.

One tool amateur web designers should use when creating graphics for their sites is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop and similar programs enable amateurs to design sites quickly. By not having a program like this, you will be at a disadvantage because making a beautiful website design from scratch takes a lot of time and knowledge.

Apart from the aesthetics of your website, remember that all files included must be small. Keeping your files small will directly affect how fast your website loads. It is always better to have your website load as fast as possible. You must keep in mind that not all visitors will have a fast Internet connection. Test each section of your site to ensure it loads rapidly for every visitor.

Be sure your site can handle Internet Explorer, both new and old versions. While it is often viewed as a sub par browser, a large number of users are still using old versions of this browser. Many elements are not in compliance with web standards, so finding a workaround will be required. Specifically, you should get up to date about an issue that plagued IE called “box model bug”.

Now you understand much more about web design. Now that you have an idea in mind, it’s time to put all of the tools and ideas you admired on other sites to paper and create a rough layout of what to incorporate into your website design. Be creative with it and have fun.