Tag Archives: web-design

What to Look for in a Website Builder

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Hosting

The post What to Look for in a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . You know you need a website, but you don’t know the first thing about how to build one. Without any coding or design skills, you’re not really sure where to start. But these days, you don’t need a complex set of skills to design a website, you just need a good website builder. Website builders make creating and customizing a website easy enough for anybody to do it—no coding required. When you start looking into which website builder to use for your new website, you’ll notice that there are a lot of options to choose from. Trying to figure out which one to go with can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know enough to even know what to look for. Top 10 Features to Look for in a Website Builder When choosing the right website builder for you, there are ten main factors you should consider.   1. Ease of use A website builder is supposed to make the process of building a website easy (that’s kind of the whole point). When you’re considering what website builder to go with, make sure you find one that has an intuitive editing tool so you can easily shape your website to look and feel how you want it to. Drag-and-drop functionality is a good feature to look for, since it means you can move components of the page around with your mouse—something anyone can do, regardless of their level of web design experience. And the editing tool should have features that enable you to change out colors, add new elements to the page, and upload any media you want to add without having to learn any new skills.   2. Lots of templates The first step to creating a website with a website builder is choosing your template . The template provides a design and structure for you to start with, so you’re not having to build your site from scratch. From there, it’s easy to make changes to the template to make your website better represent your unique brand. Building your website will be easier if you’re able to select a template that comes close to what you have in mind for your site. So make sure the website builder you go with supplies a good number of templates for you to choose from.   3. Responsive options People now browse the web on their mobile devices more than their computers. For your website to work well for the majority of visitors, it needs to be mobile friendly. The best way to do that is to build a website that’s responsive. Responsive websites have all the same elements and content no matter what device you visit them on, but they’re automatically arranged in the way that makes them look good on whatever screen size a visitor views them on. The website builder you go with should offer an easy way for you to make your website responsive. Offering responsive templates is a good option, since you won’t have to do anything extra to make your website mobile friendly—you’ll start out with it that way.   4. Customization options Templates are great for making the website creation process easier, but you want to be sure you can turn that template into something unique. A good website builder should provide plenty of options for customizing your website. You should be able to change out colors, add new pages, load your own images, and add icons and buttons in the shapes and sizes you desire. You don’t want a website that looks just like everybody else’s, the whole point is to create something that represents your specific brand. Go with a website builder that gives you plenty of room to customize the template you choose to turn it into something wholly yours.   5. SEO features With so many websites already out there, getting people to find yours will be a challenge. A website builder that has SEO features can give you a little head start by helping you optimize your website’s pages for visibility in the search engines. Adding relevant keywords to each web page’s URL, meta description , and image tags communicates to Google what your website is about so they’re more likely to include you in searches for that term. A good website builder will make that easy to do.   6. Social share features Once your website’s up, you want to promote it! And ideally, you want visitors that like your site to promote it too. Social share features can help on both fronts. You can easily push out new content to your social networks to let your followers know about it, and you can make it easy for visitors to share your web pages with their followers with one click as well.   7. Affordability You probably don’t have a ton of money to spend on your website. And website builders generally bill on a subscription model, so you have to consider the long-term costs as well as what you can afford at this moment. Choose a website builder that falls within your ongoing budget for your website. Most website builders cost somewhere in the range of $4-$40 a month. In some cases, the cost includes features or services you would otherwise have to spend more for, so make sure you consider everything that’s included in the price instead of just going with the cheapest option.   8. Image library All websites need images, they’re a key part of how people will experience the site. Unless you’re a photographer or illustrator, finding good images to populate your site with can be difficult and time consuming. A website builder that includes an image library can save you a lot of trouble, make your website look great, and help you get your website up and running faster,   9. Educational resources While ideally, the website builder you use will be easy to figure out, you still want access to helpful resources that lay out what all the features are and how to use them. Check if the website builder you consider offers tutorials on how to use it. You’ll get more out of your website builder if you’re able to get a full understanding of everything it can do for you and how to make use of it all.   10. Good customer support If you face any issues while creating your website, or worse, once it’s up, you want to trust you can get ahold of someone to help fast. Look for a website builder that offers 24/7 support and has a reputation for being helpful when customers need it. Hopefully you won’t ever need customer support, but it’s important to know it’s there and reliable if you ever do. A website builder should make your life easier and enable you to put together a website that does everything you want it to. But it’s important to find one that offers everything you need.   Meet the HostGator Website Builder HostGator offers a website builder that does everything on the list and comes with web hosting included. You can save a little money by investing in both things at once, and get started creating the website you’ve been wanting. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Hosting

The post Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your website is the main face of your brand online. And building your website with best practices in mind will ensure your brand is putting its best foot forward. What people see when they visit it influences how they see your brand – online and off. And your web design largely defines how people experience your website. In short, web design is important. A bad web design can make your website layout look unprofessional, lose visitors’ trust, or make it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for (and therefore increasing instead of reducing your bounce rates ). A good website design shows your visitors you know what you’re doing and that it’s worth sticking around and interacting with your brand. Whether you’re working on a building new website or launching a re-design for the one you already have, there are a few important web design best practices you should honor. 1. Make Your Site Navigation Intuitive. Part of the design process is figuring out how to organize all the pages and what to include in your website menus . Getting your site organization right is both important for your website architecture and because it determines how easy navigating your website is for visitors. When deciding what pages, categories, and subcategories to include in your website’s menus, think first about your visitors. What will make it easier for the average visitor to find what they’re looking for? But also decide what the most important pages you want them to find are. Strive to organize your website in a way that will make it just as intuitive to a first-time visitor as it is to someone who knows it well.   2. Maintain a Consistent Style. If you visited a website that had a specific style on the home page but changed to something completely different on the next page you linked on, you’d find the change confusing. You might wonder if you were in the right place at all or had somehow navigated away from the site you thought you were on. You don’t want your site visitors to deal with that kind of confusion. Early on in the design process, sit down to develop a web design style guide . A style guide is a useful web design tool that will help you make sure all the pages on your website visually match well enough to let visitors know they’re all related to each other as well as to your brand. Make sure it includes: The website’s color scheme The logo design to use (and any variations on it in terms of size and shape you’ll use throughout the site) The font(s) The visual style (for example, do you want a minimalist feel? A playful one?) As you move into the particulars of designing the site, your style guide will be a helpful resource to keep you on track.   3. Design Each Page With a Goal in Mind. You’re not just designing a website for fun, you want it to accomplish something. And even if you have one overarching goal for the whole website, different web pages will need to have more specific goals. For example, an eCommerce website will primarily be designed to get people to make purchases. But in order to do that, some pages will be focused on getting people to visit the website to begin with, so they’ll have the primary goal of improving search engine optimization  or encouraging social shares. Other pages will more directly try to get people to click that “Buy” button. Clearly define the specific goal you want and  to accomplish this and make sure your design for it centers the goal.   4. Keep Each Page Focused. Another good web design tip that goes hand in hand with having a specific goal for each web page is to make sure your pages have a clear focus. Don’t try to do too much on any one webpage. You don’t want your web pages to look cluttered – that not only makes it look bad (which makes visitors more likely to click away), but it also presents too many distractions. How will people know the next best step to take, if your page is filled with so many links and images and text that they can’t figure out what to focus on? If you realize a particular web page has too much going on, split it up into multiple pages. Having separate pages that each has a more clear focus will be good for user experience and improve your opportunities to optimize for SEO.   5. Make Your Website Responsive. Mobile use now surpasses computer use ,  and every year the amount of time people spend on the web on mobile devices only grows. For website owners, that means your web design has to prioritize the mobile friendly experience . In most cases, the best option for creating a website that works well both on desktop and mobile devices is to build a responsive website. Responsive web design involves identifying breakpoints on the page where the page can be cut off and everything to the side moved below the breakpoint without the experience losing anything. That’s why mobile devices often display the same images and text, but with all elements of the page that appear alongside each other on the desktop showing up as stacked above and below each other. When designing each page on your website, you need to define at least three breakpoints to ensure your pages work well on each of the three main device sizes (although many designers prefer to use more). To a large degree, responsive websites have become common enough that most web design tools or designers you turn to will automatically employ best practices for responsive web design. As just one example, all of the templates offered with HostGator’s website builder are responsive, so even newbie website owners that don’t know anything about HTML or other coding languages can easily create a website that’s responsive. No matter what web design tools you use though, make sure you design your website with mobile in mind and use responsive design best practices.   6. Use Fluid Images. Fluid images  can aid in responsive web design and improve user experience on your website. You can make any of the images you use fluid with the right HTML code. If you add “max-width: 100%” to the source code for the image, you’re letting browsers know to resize the image to fit the page on every device. As an example, the full code would look like: This will keep your images from blocking text or other parts of the page on devices where they outgrow the section of the page you want them to stay contained within.   7. Make Clickable Elements Large Enough for Mobile. Another important component of good mobile-friendly website design is thinking about how people use their mobile devices. Clicking a small button on a computer is easy with the pointer that you have total control over and that can get very specific in what it points to. On a mobile device though, you have to be able to “click” that same button by touching it with your finger. If a link or button is too small, or worse, if you have different links located too close together, your users will struggle to get the links to work. When designing your web pages, make sure you test each one out on a small mobile device to confirm that all the links and buttons are easy to use.   8. Use Visual Hierarchies. This relates back to the goals you developed for each page of your website. Every page will include the most important information that you want people to notice, as well as additional information and design elements that matter, but aren’t of the same level of importance. In order to make sure that every visitor on every device sees the most important parts of the page before moving on, develop a visual hierarchy for each web page. The most important elements need to go at the top so they show up for everybody, and the other parts of the page can fall further down for the people interested enough to keep scrolling to see the whole page.   9. Make Your Site Accessible. Your visitors don’t all interact with the web in the same way. While that’s useful to consider in general, it’s an even more important point to remember when designing for people with different types of disabilities. An important web design tip to keep in mind during the design process is, therefore, to aim for inclusivity and accessibility. The Web Accessibility Initiative has outlined a number of Accessibility Principles for web designers to honor when creating their websites. The people who benefit most from accessible web design may be in the minority, but some are very likely in your target audience. By building an accessible website, you open your brand up to a wider audience and can build goodwill with a community that’s often underserved.   10. Stick to Design Standards. Have you ever been confused by a website that has its menu in a different spot than you’re used to? Or had a hard time closing a pop up that had the X in a weird spot? While web designers can often benefit from finding ways to be creative or unique, there are certain  web design standards that  define how people interact with websites and what they expect to find. When you move away from these norms, you risk creating confusion and a negative experience for your customers. A few of the main standards it’s a best practice to stick with include:     Putting your logo in the top left     Putting contact information in the top right     Having your main menu stretch across the top of the screen     Putting your value proposition high up on the home page     Including a CTA high up on the home page     Adding a search feature to the header When you think about it, everything on that list is probably exactly what you expect to see when you visit a website. If you’re going to venture away from these standards, make sure you think thoughtfully about why and make sure you’re not creating unnecessary confusion in the process.   A Good Design Makes for a Good Website Your web design determines how your website will look and feel to the people that visit it. Getting it right is paramount to the success of your website . Take some time to understand the main web design best practices and create a website that people will find useful and intuitive. 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Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Hosting

The post Get Your Small Business Online Fast with a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . For years, people have been saying your small business needs a website. You know it’s true, but you’ve been busy, you know, running a small business . Who has time to drop everything and throw a website together, especially when you know nothing about building or designing a website? Nearly a third of small businesses still don’t have a website. That makes sense if you think about how busy small business owners are and how overwhelming the skills required to build a website seem. But it makes no sense when you think about how much of our lives — and shopping habits — have moved online. 5 Reasons Your Small Business Needs a Website…Fast Maybe you’ve had good, understandable reasons for dragging your feet so far, but having a business website is no longer optional. Every day your business goes without one, you’re leaving money on the table. Still not convinced? Here are five important points that may sway you.   1.  The majority of people in the U.S. shop online. And we don’t just mean a few over 50%, a full 96% of people do some of their shopping online. You probably do it yourself. It’s easy and it saves time. Shopping online means avoiding crowds, traffic, and parking. And if you’re not giving consumers that option, your competitors are winning that business.   2. Even when they shop in store, consumers like to use online tools. That doesn’t mean people are done with heading to a store to shop. In fact 79% of people still do at least as much of their shopping in person as they do online. But even for the customers willing to come to you, the internet plays a role. When they’re trying to figure out where to go to buy the item they need, where do you think they turn? They go online. If they want to compare the prices of similar items at a few different stores or check if the store has an item they need in stock, same thing. A lot of people now take some time to do online research before heading out to do their shopping. Without a website, you’re at a disadvantage during the research stage.   3. A website makes you more discoverable. Right now, the people who can find your business are those who already know about you, those that they tell, and the people who happen to drive by. Maybe that’s been enough for you to stay afloat, but think about how many people those three categories don’t cover. How many potential customers never become actual ones because they simply never learn your business exists? If you don’t show up when they search online for businesses in the area, you might as well be invisible to them.   4. A website gives you a way to alert customers to your hours and specials. Have you ever showed up at a business ready to spend money, only to find they were closed? It’s a frustrating feeling, especially if the drive to get there was at all long. You can save your customers from that frustration when you have a website that lists your hours. Even better, you can entice them to come in at times they wouldn’t have otherwise by using your site to advertise all your specials and sales. You get more business, your customers get a better experience.   5. A business website makes you look more legitimate. People expect legitimate businesses to have websites. In a world where scams abound, the first place people turn to make sure a business can be trusted is Google. If they don’t find a website, it makes you look suspicious at worst, behind the times at best. Either way, it doesn’t help your case. Obviously, you need to get your website up fast. But how? That’s easy: you need a website builder.   What Is a Website Builder? A website builder is web design tool that makes it easy for anyone — even if you have no coding knowledge — to create your own website. Website builders typically come with a number of templates you can choose from so you don’t have to start from scratch and an intuitive website editor that makes it easy to make changes to the template. You can change out colors, add original text and images, and move elements of the page around, all without having to mess with html or learn complicated web design skills.   How to Get Your Website Up Fast With a Website Builder Here are the steps to take when creating your business website using a website builder.   1. Choose your website builder. You’ve got options here. A number of different companies offer easy-to-use website builders. A few are free, but most use a subscription model where you pay every month or year for as long as you have your website. One way to save money and time on choosing your website builder is to go with one that includes something else you need to run a website, such as web hosting. HostGator’s web builder plans come with our website hosting included, so you can launch your website as soon as you’ve built it.   2. Establish your priorities. If your goal is to get a website up as fast as possible, then you don’t need your website to do everything right away. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw together a sloppy website — it’s still needs to look and be professional — but you can create a good website quickly by figuring out the most important things you need it to do right away. Ask yourself: what are the most important things your customers need to know? That’s what your website needs to communicate on day one. This likely includes: Your unique positioning – what your business does and why customers should choose you over your competitors Your contact information Your address Your hours You can work on adding more valuable information and marketing elements to your website later, if you want. For now, make sure you have a website that looks good and covers the basics.   3. Decide on your color scheme. You want every page of your website to visually communicate a cohesive brand identity. One of the best ways to do that is to use the same color scheme throughout the whole site. If your Home page is yellow and blue and your About page is black and green, confused visitors will wonder if they’ve navigated away from your website. Does your store or logo already have a clear color scheme? If so, go ahead and stick with those colors when building your website. If not, decide now what colors you want to represent your brand. Make sure they go well together and are pleasing to the eye.   4. Choose your theme. Go through the templates your website builder offers to find one that’s a good fit for your website. Remember that you can make as many changes to the details of the theme as you want. It’s only a starting point for you to work from. Don’t worry if the example website in the theme is for a business in a different industry or they use different colors than you want — you’ll be changing all that. Pay attention instead to the structure of the pages and the visual style of the theme, if those come close to what you want, you won’t have to make as many changes to get your website ready to go.   5. Decide what pages to include. Let the priorities you decided on guide you here. It’s standard for business websites to include a Home page, an About page, and a Contact page. Beyond that, you may want to create pages for all of the main categories of products or services you sell. Over time, you may want to add in product pages for each specific product you offer or even convert your website to an eCommerce store, but since the goal right now is to get your website up fast, those plans can be on the backburner. But do consider now what your long-term hopes are for the website. It will help you create a solid plan for how to organize your website so it stays intuitive as it grows.   6. Edit the theme with your chosen colors and style. With a good website editor, this should be pretty easy. You can select the colors you picked for your color scheme and fill in different parts of the page with a few clicks. Once you do this on one page, you can make a copy of the page when you’re ready to start on the next so you don’t have to re-do your color changes.   7. Load and position original images. Your theme probably includes some stock images. Replace those with original images that are relevant to your store. Add your logo to the top right corner of the page. Add photos of your store or products, or illustrations that communicate something about your brand.   8. Add original copy. Take time to make the words on your website purposeful. Use them to explain what your business does and make a case for why visitors should buy from you. Make your copy customer-focused. When describing what you do, make it less about how that work looks on your end and more about how it makes your customers’ lives better or easier. With time, you may want to hire a professional copywriter to improve upon what you write now. Good copy can be powerful in getting your visitors to choose you. But today the most important thing is that it’s clear, it tells your visitors what they need to know, and it’s free from embarrassing typos and errors. To achieve that last part, make sure you proofread every page twice and see if you can get a friend to read over it as well to confirm that it’s all clear and looks good.   9. Create a website plan for moving forward. All of the steps here are focused on getting your website out there to begin with. That’s a really important step to take and one that already makes a big difference in how visible and accessible your business will be to people. But to get the most out of a website once you have it, there’s more work to do. Make a plan now for how to improve your website over time. That could be as simple as doing regular website maintenance , updating your hours for holidays, and adding information on the website each time you have a sale. Or you could create a full plan to launch an eCommerce store and start doing online marketing. Either way, don’t publish your website once and forget about it. Your website will need some care to stay up to date and do its job for you in the months and years to come.   What Are You Waiting For? Sounds easy enough, right? So no more excuses. Choose a website builder and get your website up and running fast. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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Top 15 Web Design Trends 2018

Posted on September 12, 2018 by Hosting

The post Top 15 Web Design Trends 2018 appeared first on HostGator Blog . Your average internet user may not notice it day by day, but web design trends are always changing. We can all agree that what looked good to visitors in the 90’s certainly wouldn’t play well today, but noticing the more subtle changes in design that happen each year is harder. The shifts in web design norms are slow, but they’re worth paying attention to. Even if you’re not a great web designer and your skills begin and end with what you can do in a website builder , you can avoid waking up one day to realize your website is hopelessly outdated by reading up on the web design trends of 2018. 1. Responsive Design Responsive websites are not a new web design trend in 2018, but they’re an important enough one to still include here. As mobile usage only seems to keep going up – it first surpassed desktop a couple of years ago – making sure your website works at least as well on mobile devices as it does on bigger screens is crucial. Visitors quite simply won’t stick around if your website provides a disappointing mobile experience, and it’s bad for SEO on top of everything else. While you could create a separate version of your website that works well on mobile devices from the one people see on desktop, for most businesses the better option is to make one website that’s responsive. On a responsive website, each page has all the same copy, images, and elements no matter what device you view it on, but they’re arranged differently based on the size of the screen. An image that shows up next to the text on your desktop may show up below it on a smaller screen, for instance. Making your website responsive ensures that your mobile users get all the same information and value from your website, while still having a user friendly experience. As an added tip, if creating a responsive website sounds intimidating, consider a website builder that offers responsive templates. Most of the work will already be done for you. 2. Chatbots You’ve probably noticed in your own internet surfing that a lot of business websites now have a little window pop up at the bottom right side of the screen when you land on the website, giving you the chance to chat with a representative. Adding a chat window like this to your website means any visitor with a question can have it answered immediately. But for many websites, having someone available to answer those questions in real time is too much of a challenge. One possible solution:  utilizing a  chatbot . You can program a chatbot to answer the most common questions your customers have so that most visitors still get their answer right away. For questions the chatbot doesn’t know, you can at least program it to provide details on how best to get in touch with a live representative so your visitor still knows what to do next. Chatbots don’t make sense for every type of website , but if you have a business website and you frequently hear a few main questions from your visitors, they can save your staff time while still providing your visitors with a good experience.   3. Animation Autoplay videos are very much out, but that doesn’t mean your website has to be completely static. You can add some movement to your web design with some simple animations. A growing number of websites are working animations into the background or images of web pages. A good animation will draw the eye and capture a visitor’s interest, without distracting from the main information you want them to see on the page. It’s a web design trend that makes your website a little more engaging and adds some personality. 4. Microinteractions Microinteractions take animation one step further in terms of user engagement. These are animations that respond to what the user does on the page. If you notice a website changing when you mouse over a particular spot, or an animation that’s triggered by scrolling down – those are microinteractions. These create a positive user experience because they hand visitors power over what they see as they interact with the site. Knowing your actions shape the design in front of you is a good feeling, even if it’s only in minor ways. Microinteractions are becoming more common around the web, making them a good web design trend to have on your radar in 2018.   5. Original Illustrations Stock photography’s easy, but it doesn’t add any personality to your website. That’s why many website owners are now turning to original illustrations for the images on their pages. Custom illustrations do come at a cost – artists must be paid – but they can transform the style of your website and create an entirely unique experience. Custom illustrations often feel playful, while still doing the work of communicating something about your brand. You get to choose the colors you want to include and can craft imagery that might be hard to stage in a photo. If you can find a good artist for your website, they’re a good way to inject some extra personality into the website experience.   6. Including Social Proof So far, most of these website design trends come with a fairly hefty price tag that may be out of reach for small businesses or websites devoted to passions rather than profit. This one is much more affordable. Social proof is a way to convince new visitors that you’re awesome by showing evidence of your success with other visitors. For a business, it could be logos of companies you work with or testimonials from other customers. For a blog, it could be publishing the number of email subscribers you have. You can (and should) tell other people how awesome your website is in your copy, but your words aren’t going to mean as much to visitors as proof that other people like them think you’re awesome. Find a way to work social proof into the design of your website to better highlight your value to new visitors. 7. Hamburger Menus This is a controversial web design trend that’s commonly used on apps and mobile websites because it’s an easy way to provide a menu that takes up very little space. The hamburger icon itself is very small, and it opens up your main menu when you click on it.  As it’s become more familiar to internet users with the growth of mobile, its use has started to spill over into the design of desktop websites as well. A hamburger menu removes the list of pages in your main menu from all the pages of your website and puts them behind the hamburger icon. If you want a website that has a very clean design, it allows you to include fewer elements on each page while still providing the navigation items your visitors need. As mentioned though, it is a controversial web design trend. It may not be right for your audience. This is a trend you should be very intentional about considering – only use it if you have a good reason.   8. Rounder Edges For a while buttons, windows, and containers on websites tended to have sharp corners. Recently more web designers are starting to shift their website designs toward softer, rounder edges. This is a web design trend you can see in buttons and chat windows around the web. Plenty of websites still maintain their sharp edges, and some use a mix of both. This isn’t a trend that’s outright replaced the former way of doing things. But if you want to keep the shapes on your website a little softer, you’ll be in line with one of the web design trends of 2018.   9. Tactile Design Another common trend of the past was keeping web design flat. Many websites are now starting to buck the old trend by adding more shadowing and depth to the images on their pages. Tactile design can bring the images on your website more to life for your visitors. In addition, it provides a way to add emphasis to your images. The difference is often subtle, but it changes the user experience of your website and adds a little more realism.   10. Unique Fonts Choosing a unique font is an easy way to add some personality to your website and make it stand out a bit more. Fonts are part of a website that many visitors don’t really notice, but you can use your font choice to add some additional style to your website and draw more attention to important words. Make sure that any font you choose is easy for your visitors to read. Style shouldn’t trump clarity here. But as long as you keep the text on your website legible for all your visitors, you can use your font choice as a way to add some extra personality to your site.   11. Asymmetry A bold choice that’s showing up on some websites now is asymmetric design. Using asymmetry in your web design provides a unique experience for your visitors, especially as it’s still not a particularly common design choice at this stage. This web design option definitely isn’t for everybody. Because it’s uncommon and unexpected, it might be less intuitive for some visitors. And it can complicate a website’s ability to remain responsive. But if you want to provide a website experience that’s outside of the box, going asymmetrical can do that.   12. Accessible Design If you don’t have any disabilities yourself, you’ve probably approached web design in the past without thinking about how people with disabilities will experience your website. That’s unfortunately normal – many web designers just haven’t had accessibility top of mind in the past. But that’s beginning to change. One of the web design trends of 2018 is working to make websites more accessible for everyone. Design magazines and blogs have started to provide tips for more accessible web design. Designing an accessible website requires broadening your perspective and doing a little work, but when you commit to it, you open up your site to an audience that was left out before.   13. Data Visualization “Big data” has been a buzzword for a few years now and businesses in all industries have seen the growing influence of data on the tools and latest trends that shape how we do business. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until the influence of data made its way to web design as well. Many websites are now incorporating data visualization into their design. In some cases it becomes a part of the main website, in others they launch a separate site to highlight valuable data they’ve created. In either case, data visualization becomes a part of the story the brand tells and the visual identity they have on the web.   14. Bold Colors A lot of the web design trends for 2018 are about standing out and this is no exception. Many websites are employing color schemes that are bright and bold. Bright colors provide a distinctive experience that make your website more memorable. You can use your color choices strategically to draw attention to parts of the website you most want people to see. This is another website design trend that isn’t for everyone. Some brands will be better served with more subtle colors, but if you’re looking for a way to make your website stand out and really get attention, making bold color choices could do the trick.   15. Floating Navigation Most of the websites you visit have their navigation in the same place: across the top of the website. Some websites are experimenting with different options though. We already talked about the hamburger menu option, but another possibility is floating navigation.   Floating navigation stays visible even as you scroll down the page. It provides a unique experience, but also offers the practical benefit of keeping all the navigation options present and visible no matter where your visitor is on the page. You can see an example of what that looks like on the Anchor and Orbit website . As yet, it’s not a particularly common web design trend. But for any website owner looking for another way to stand out, it makes your website a little more distinctive.   Staying on Trend in 2018 As in any year, in 2018 make sure that everything about your website design puts the user first. Trying out something new that you think looks cool or interesting is fine, but only if you’re confident your target audience will respond to it as well. Following website design trends can often be worth it, but paying attention to your visitors is always more important. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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How to Make a Website Quickly: Your Easy 6-Step Guide

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Hosting

The post How to Make a Website Quickly: Your Easy 6-Step Guide appeared first on HostGator Blog . How to Make a Website Quickly You’re here because you want to build a website, and you want to do it fast. Building a website used to require immense technical and development skills. But today, with the introduction of intuitive website builders you can create a website from scratch, in record time. If you don’t know where to start, or, you’re worried that building a site will be expensive, or time-consuming, then this post is for you. Below you’ll learn the exact steps you need to take to make a website in as little time as possible, even if you have no previous experience.   1. Choose the Right Website Builder More and more people are turning to website builders to help them quickly and easily build websites. From personal blogs to eCommerce stores, niche sites, and business sites . The opportunities are endless. With a website builder, you’ll be able to drag and drop your site to completion. You can move around blocks of text, add images and videos, change the font and color scheme, and a lot more. You don’t need any existing knowledge of HTML, CSS, or design best practices. Just select a theme, customize it to your liking, and press publish. However, the website builder you choose will end up making your life easier, or much more difficult. With the dozens of available website builders, it can be overwhelming to choose the right one. If you’re just getting started in your search, all HostGator packages come with a website builder you can use as an option. Not only is it low cost, but it’ll also provide you with a selection of hundreds of free themes and all the customization options you require. 2. Pick a Domain Name In order to have a website online, you’ll need a domain name. Your domain name is what your visitors will type in to access your site. For HostGator, it’s hostgator.com . You’ll have the option to purchase a domain name through the builder itself, or you can purchase it through a third-party domain name registrar. The easiest option will probably be purchasing your domain name through the website builder itself, as you’ll avoid the complex tasks of dealing with nameservers. When choosing a domain name , make sure that it’s short, memorable, and preferably uses the .com extension.   3. Select Your Theme With your account created with your website builder and your domain name purchased it’s time to start building your site. Building a website that looks good, functions properly, and is in alignment with the latest web design standards is a very difficult task. Especially if you’ve never built a website before. Luckily, by using a website builder you can choose from one of hundreds of professionally designed themes. The theme you choose will make up the foundation of your website’s design . With a drag and drop builder, you’ll be able to customize this however you see fit. Still, you’ll want to choose a theme that makes sense for your industry.   4. Customize Your Theme Once you’ve chosen your theme its time to start customizing. After all, you want a unique website, not one that looks like a stock template. It’s important to customize all of the stock elements of your builder’s theme. This is a surefire way to get a unique look, while still retaining the original functionality of the theme. For example, you can make customizations like: Adding more pages to your site Changing the stock images to your own professional photos Changing the theme’s color palette Rearranging the text elements and general layout Changing the font sizes or font style Once you start customizing your site you’ll be amazed at all the changes you can actually make.   5. Preview and Make Any Final Tweaks It can be tempting to hit publish right away and make your site live on the internet. Although you’re excited it’s important to go through a final review process. Your builder will have a preview function that lets you see what your site will look like without pushing the changes live. This will allow you to make any last minute edits and avoid any embarrassing mistakes. As you look over your site, ask yourself the following questions: Are there any glaring spelling or grammar mistakes? Are there any strange formatting errors? Do my images or videos make sense in the existing design? Do all of the buttons and links work? Can my visitors intuitively navigate my website?   6. Publish Your Site! With your final run through complete, it’s time to publish your site. Congratulations! Once you’ve published your site online, you can still make quick and easy changes from the back-end of the editor. Have family, friends, and colleagues look over your site to see if there are any changes you might have missed. It’s now time to start generating traffic, marketing your site, and making your online dreams come true. Depending on the website builder you chose, you might have additional marketing tools available that’ll help you grow your website.   Now Over to You As you can see building a website doesn’t have to be difficult—it can even be fun! By using a website builder you’ll greatly speed up the website building process while giving you full control over the end result. Get started building your site today! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading →

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