Websites have become a necessary part of the society today. More and more people are understanding the number of opportunities they can avail through their websites and are therefore working towards making better and more attractive ones. There is no doubt about the fact that if a website is user friendly, the returns on Investment is going to be higher. But is making a pretty looking website enough? Can it really get you the kind of result that you are expecting from it? Well, no matter how beautiful or attractive your website is, if it fails to load quickly, your visitor will not be interested in it. This is why we have shared a few important CSS tricks to help you make an effective website that takes very less time to load.
What is CSS?
So what is this CSS really and how can it help me make a great website? The answer to this is quite simple. CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a language used to describe the features that affect the “look” of your website. It is basically designed to be able to distinguish between the design elements (like the layout,colors and fonts) and the content elements (written in HTML or any other mark-up language).
Show me the tricks!
Page rendering
Page rendering is a very important thing that one must take care of. This is in fact one of the 1st things that you must get right before proceeding on to anything else. Keep in mind that you always mention the specific dimensions of the images and avoid universal selectors because they do not provide great results.
Unique CSS file
This is one important thing that we tend to overlook many a times. If a separate CSS file is maintained for each page, then the website will inevitably take more time to load. Ensure that your CSS files are optimized in such a way that they help your website load quickly.
Zip it up
Zipping the CSS file is a popular technique used by many professional website design and development experts. This process is known as GZipping. This helps in shedding the extra weight of the file by reducing its volume by about 70% to 80 %. A light weight file naturally implies a fast loading!
Columns
When you select upon a design for your website, try to opt for one that has a 2 to 3 column layout. It will help in making your website easy to load. It will basically ensure that the content of your website begins loading before the advertisements and other unnecessary elements of the website. It will also ascertain that your users don’t have to wait too long before they can start reading the information that you are providing.
Design with love
Love is probably the only saving grace for humankind. So ensure that whatever you do, you design a website with the utmost care, attention and love. It is critically important that you understand the significance of the website or what the website means to the cause. There are many kinds of websites, but before you begin with designing one, identify the purpose of the website. Based on your understanding of the purpose, categorize the client base or target audience. Not only will this help you make a website that appeals to the target audience, it will also help you eliminate whatever is unnecessary with respect to the purpose and the target. You can choose to embrace minimalism creating a website that is ideal for everyone and pleasing to the eye. Since very few elements are used in a minimal website, it is quite obvious that it takes a lot less time in order to load.
Conclusion
User Experience is your bread and butter. The only way to success is to ensure that your users appreciate your product. A website is the first mode of interaction between a potential customer and the service provider. If the potential customers “like” the website, a certain faith is generated. If he thinks that your website is not efficient, that is the same impression he will carry throughout about the company itself. Ensure that your website is 100% user centric, offering information that the user wants and not what you want to offer. Follow these basic steps to give a delightful experience to your users, who will keep coming back to you for more.
About the Author
Eathelin Waugh is a professional web developer working at a company named hire web designer india. She likes all the things related to web designing and web development. She has been working for offshore web development since many years.