Companies make millions doing what you can yourself. Avoid being scammed and learn the techniques you need to build a creative and effective site. Start now by reading the tips that follow.

Don't neglect cascading style sheets. Using a style sheet makes it easy to give all pages of your site the same look and feel. It also reduces the file size of your pages, as the CSS file can be accessed once on the server and then from the user's local cache thereafter.

The faster a web page loads, the more it will be appreciated. You should minimize the loading time of your site's pages. Your visitors are more likely to lose interest in your website and leave the page if they have to wait for a few minutes before having access to the content.

Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.

Test your site to see if the major translation services work properly when translating your site. Some sites receive many international visitors, and these visitors sometimes use services like BabelFish and Google Translate to translate the text to their language. Certain web design problems, especially poor server side code, can break these services.

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.

If you plan on having a commercial site, you should seriously consider buying your own web hosting. Most free host sites force you to display their advertisements, which is counter-intuitive if you are attempting to sell something as well. Purchase your own hosting to avoid this advertising hassle, so that you can choose your own ads.

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.

Learning some basic HTML will help you add some interesting extras to your site. For example, you can have words that follow your cursor, or a banner that flashes important information. Make sure to change the colors and fonts occasionally, so you seem more involved with the web site and its design.

If you want your site to reach search engines, ditch frames. While visitors to your site may enjoy the pages that have frames, search engines do not pick up the information contained within frames. If there is important information that you want the search engines to see on your website, never put it within a frame. This will lead to a reduction in visitors.

Meta tags used on each page of your site, can increase visitors to your site. This is an important design consideration. High-quality meta tags will let the search engines know what your website is about. Poor or useless tags that are irrelevant to your site will deter future and returning visitors.

When designing a website with a lot of text, choose your fonts wisely. While serif text will work well for a title or headline, the body of the text should be in a serif font, which is easier to read on a computer screen. Try to use common computer fonts such as Times New Roman and Ariel.

Run tests on different browser applications to make sure your site works on all of them. Every browser interprets sites in their own way, and sometimes that can lead to drastic differences in the way a site appears to a user, affecting not only visual elements, but functional elements as well. Utilize the Internet by researching which browsers are the most commonly used. Use different browsers to test your website, even mobile web browsers.

Hosting your site yourself isn't recommended, even if you might have invested lots of money into it. Design as much as you can yourself, but letting someone else host it will free up some of your time, allowing you to work on other things.

After you understand a little more about web design, you can begin experimenting with techniques and ideas. The tips shown here demonstrate the fact that it is not hard to absorb the basics of good web design. Once you study up on these tips, the only thing left to do is use what you learned here and create beautiful websites.