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Ever visited a graphics heavy website? How long does it take to load all of the images? Makes you feel lazy or impatient doesn’t it? That’s how visitors react to most web site, they just don’t like a slow loading site or in other words, people don’t like to wait. It’s easy to just browse then close their browser tab.

Making a web design isn’t easy as what most people think. A well planned web site will have a lot of visitors in the long run. Take a look at Twitter. Why do you think it’s popular and successful? From its topic search engine? Yes, but that’s not all. From its availability among other devices and easy to use features? Yes and yes. Twitter is easy to use, it has compatibility to other devices AND it’s a very light web design. The web design is ingenious. It’s fast and that’s all that matters.

Having a fast website makes a huge difference. Compared to other websites that also has the same idea, Twitter easily wins for being the easiest and fastest website. It’s clutter free and “tweets” are organized properly. That’s how a good web design should be.

Here are 3 easy tips that will help you build a fast and simple web site.

Let your design breathe
Let your design have a comfortable feel. Don’t cram all your web page elements into one space. Let them have good spaces between them. Websites would look like a mess if you stick web elements too close together. It would also look different on other browsers and may overlap each other, so give your web design space.

CSS Optimization
Take a look at Andreas Viklund’s templates. His web designs are featured in Wordpress. CSS Optimization makes your sheets easy to understand, clean and easy to edit. How does this make your websites load fast? If you use less images and more CSS reliant on background colors, your web page would be lighter. It would also allow you to easily change your themes without going over your codes and touching HTML.

Avoid using multimedia
If your website doesn’t really need Flash or Java, don’t use them. It will only make your website look complicated and makes long loading time. Having great multimedia graphics is good but only if its actually useful and simple. Most of the time, these Java/Flash effects only makes it hard for people to access the information they want to get.

Although website templates are on one of the greatest things that happened in web designing, you might want to know some of its disadvantages. However, one common thing about these disadvantages is that they do not really undermine the performance of website templates, only that for more choosy and meticulous website owners, these disadvantages may prove to be great obstacles for their sites.

Since it is a website template, expect that other sites that made use of the same template would look like your website. It is already a given that the possibility of having similar looking websites in the net is a big possibility. If you find this unsettling, then you would have to do some modifications in order to achieve some sense of individuality amidst many similarities in the design.

Another problem that can be troubling for some web designers is the fact that customization for most website templates is usually limited. Incorporating too many modifications in one area might cause some problems in other areas. The most unfortunate thing would be finding out that your content is too much for the template that you have already purchased.

Sometimes there are some software that you would like to use in your site that may not be supported or are may not be compatible by the website template you have. This could potentially cripple your business especially if that software is very important in your whole marketing scheme. However, you can still do something about this problem but this would require some assistance from a web developer.

You need to make sure that the template you chose requires you to use optimized images. Or else, you would be facing two problems. One, the images that you use may be large and could slow down your site. Another is, you would need to know how to edit photos in order to be able to resize them. Either you start learning photo editing or hire somebody to do it for you.

Website templates really do not do much in terms of search engine optimization. In fact, unlike custom-made website designs where you can specifically make SEO part of the design itself, some website templates are just made for the purpose of giving you a sort of framework for your site. Thus, it is either you do the SEO manually or customize the website template in order for it to accommodate SEO strategies.

If you notice, there is really nothing wrong with using website templates, unless of course you wanted to have a lot of specifics for your website. On a brighter note, these disadvantages are easy to overcome with enough coding skills, a team of capable web developers and patience.