5 best practices for web design beginners
When learning web design, there are many things that you have to familiarize yourself with. It is easy to get confused. That is why you should always seek out the best web design practices so that you can produce code that is clean and easy to understand. Let us take a look at 5 best practices for web design beginners by http://graemewinchester.co.uk that are worth remembering.
1. Validate as much as possible
To be on safe side, validate your code continuously. HTML and CSS are easy to learn but they might give you a headache once you complete your website and you discover that there are validation errors that you can’t seem to identify. You can download the free web developer toolbar which provides the “Validate CSS” and “Validate HTML” options.
2. Train yourself to use the heading tags, H1 – H6
Most people tend to avoid the use of these tags and only use H1 to H4. However, you should ensure that you use all the tags, from H1 to H6. If possible, replace your <p> tags with <H6>. These heading tags allow search engines to identify and correctly classify the content on your website.
3. Include the “alt” attribute for all images
Fill in all the alt sections of your image tags. This section is important for your validation and accessibility reasons. It also describes the image to users in case the image does not load.
For example:
<img src=”plantains.jpg” /> Exclusion of the alt section is wrong.
<img src=”plantains.jpg” alt=”Plantain farm” /> This is correct since the alt section is included.
4. Ensure that you close all your tags
Most tags used in html have closing tags. As a beginner, you might forget to include the closing tag. Always double check your code or better yet, write the opening tag and closing tag before you fill in the contents between them.
For example when writing an ordered list, first write the tags before filling in the contents like this:
<ol>
<li> </li>
<li> </li>
</ol>
5. Once your website is complete, compress it
Compressing your JavaScript and CSS reduces the size of each file by around 25%. This will save you a substantial amount of space and bandwidth.
Keeping this web practices in mind will make your web design learning curve much easier.