If you are a business owner, one of the most expensive tasks you have ahead of you is the building of a website. Designing it yourself can save you a ton of money. However, you should never cut corners. Use the tips contained here to start creating a website that can rival those designed by the pros.

Unless your website can be viewed on a variety of browsers, it is unlikely to produce the desired results. Ensure that the site can be easily navigated on the most popular browsers. Even though your website may display perfectly on Internet Explorer, this doesn’t mean that it will look the same on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. Verify the way in which your pages load in all major browsers prior to your official launch.

Have a site map. These are useful to your clients and the search engines, as they give a detailed overview of your entire website. It can be a guide for viewers searching for a certain part of your site, and also allow you to keep track of its structure and layout.

To help your visitors be able to easily read your site, you should design it using contrasting colors. If you use colors that contrast, it makes the text stand out. If you have black text with a black background you will not be able to see the information, but if you have black text with a white background it becomes simple to read.

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.

Don’t allow pop-ups on your website. Although you may think they are helpful, many people think they are annoying. Internet users will be more likely to leave your site and not find it trustworthy if you use pop-ups.

When the time comes that you must choose your webpage’s background color, be mindful of the effectiveness and conservative choice that white is. White backgrounds make copy much more easily readable and give your site a more mature look. However, intricate background images are often difficult to pull off; more often than not they appear sloppy and distracting. It is usually best to keep a simple background.

Create a scalable and reliable website. As technology advances and monitors keep changing, you can’t test your site across all platforms and screen sizes. Make sure the design, hosting, and code is scalable. Do this by making sure it’s error-free and making the loading smooth. This helps you create a good design that works for many circumstances.

Whilst development platforms can be helpful as they create your web code for you, some of them can be very unreliable, and you may actually find using a generic text editor is a better option. What a platform does is help you paste the code onto features that you have made. If you hope to gain a real understanding of coding, though, then a text editor is a good learning tool.

Understand that when you first start out that it’s going to take time for your site to become popular. You can try your best to generate as much traffic to your site as possible but make sure that you know what to expect so that you can continuously adapt your strategies accordingly.

It’s not going to be an easy journey from newbie to design expert. You’ll probably make some mistakes along the way. If keep using what you’ve read here, you’ll be able to figure out how to make great websites that customers will flock to.