Designing a website takes time, patience and a little bit of know-how. It can be easy if you already know what goes into great design, such as SEO and useful navigation. Read on to find some great tips and tricks which will help you build the website of your dreams!

For multimedia presentations, take advantage of the new HTML5 standard. Although HTML5 isn’t quite as robust for animation and games as Flash, it has the advantage of working stably on mobile phone browsers, including those contained in Apple hardware. HTML5 is also quite a bit leaner than Flash, so load times will improve, as well.

Keep your page sizes to a minimum. Not all internet users have fast connection speeds, and the longer your site takes to load, the less interest they will have. You do not want your page viewers to be stuck waiting for every page to download, or they may end up abandoning your site.

Regularly distributing a newsletter can help to secure repeat visitors. If you have your clients subscribe to updates, they will have a reason to come back again and again. Place the signup form in a sidebar on your site, and keep track of the people that sign up. Your newsletter should only go out to those who specifically request to receive it, or you run the risk of turning off your customers.

Do some keyword research. While your main focus should always be on providing your customer with relevant and current information, you first need to work on gaining a customer base. Understanding what keywords will bring people to your site from a search engine is a needed step to becoming a successful site.

Be sure your website works both with and without the “www” prefix. Some people will type this in before they head to your site as a force of habit, and some may not. You should make sure that customers will be directed to your site either way, or you may have some confused people on your hands.

Do not use images for your background. When you think about some of the biggest websites on the Internet, they do not have images as backgrounds. When you use image backgrounds, you represent yourself as someone who is not well-versed in web designing. Images as backgrounds also cause your site to load slower, which can lead to user frustration.

Remember to utilize ALT tags for images as you design your website. These tags provide several very important functions in that they describe images for people who browse the Internet with graphics disabled, and provide descriptions for people who are visually impaired and utilize tools that translate images to voice. If your images are used as links, ALT tags also provide a way for you to describe the behavior of the link. Finally, ALT tags are used by search engine crawlers, and therefore using them can help boost your search rank.

Now that you’ve read the ideas in this article, you should be able to go forth and design a website which will rival those of your competition. Keep learning to find new techniques to increase your traffic, add new content and boost your page to the top of your market!