More and more of our lives take place online these days, so web pages that do not work well are not going to receive much positive attention. If you need to learn more about designing an effective web page that will get people coming back again and again to your website, this article is for you.

To help make your site more interactive incorporate games into your site. Having games on your site makes it a lot of fun for the visitor. If your visitors are not having a good time on your site, then they will leave and go look for something else to do.

Draw inspiration from other pages that you feel you can gain great influences from so that your site can become a piece of excellent work. You want to take in the things that you like from other sites and avoid adding in things that you don't like to make your site better than your competitions.

You should set aside at least one day per week to update your website. If you're not updating it, you should at least check up on it to make sure that it's functioning properly. As a site designer, it's up to you, and you alone, to ensure that your site is in perfect working condition. If you fail to do so, you could lose a lot of traffic.

Every website designer needs a good platform to test their work out on, and XAMPP is probably the best out there. XAMPP will allow you to run your test sites with PHP and mySQL, so you will always be able to spot anything that needs to be changed. XAMPP is a relatively light download and it's also easy to figure out.

Keep the size of your web pages small. A lot of modern web pages are full of unnecessary elements, including huge images, Flash advertising, and lots of AJAX. Many people, especially those in rural areas and other countries with less-developed internet infrastructure, don't have high-speed Internet and will have to wait forever for a large page to load.

Many web designers make the mistake of trying to completely fill all the white space on their page. You do not have to do that. A clean, simple page can really come off as professional and informative while making it easy to find the information that the visitor had come to the site to find.

Always mark files that must be opened in an external program with an icon. Many sites host PDF files, and less commonly, DOC files, that must be opened in Foxit Reader and Microsoft Word/OpenOffice, respectively. These files should be marked with an icon representing the file type, and a link to download the appropriate viewer if the user does not have it.

Avoid using frames. Most sites have abandoned frames on their own as better alternatives have become available, but there are still sites out there that are trapped in 1996. Alternatives to navigational frames include fixed-position navigation panels, having navigation in multiple areas (e.g. left and bottom) or simplifying page structure so that navigational links are never far away.

To help you design a website that is free of clutter, do not include any scrolling text on your site. Websites that have things constantly moving back and forth on the screen is really distracting to the visitor. Not only is this distracting and annoying, it screams unprofessional and will cause your visitors to leave quickly.

YouTube is a great resource to learn a few things about site design. The best part about checking out YouTube is that you're able to watch the design in action. You're not simply reading about it. Visual aid like this can help you get the hang of site building a lot quicker than reading about it.