A good web design is the one where you can stick to the basic principles of web design and avoiding some of the common errors of a website designing.
An excellent website design skill is achieved through a lot of experience, commitment and learning through the mistakes we make. Excellent website design which you see online now a days are the output of a web designer who has learned this hard and easy way.
In this article I have come up with some tips and principles which a web designer should stick to. These tips are the one which most website and graphic designers ignore for one reason or the other. If every website stays with these principles which I have mentioned below will be an overall healthy website both for the website owner as well as visitors to your website.
1)Don’t make visitors think – One of the most and the common mistakes every web designer makes is to make the visitor think what to do when they reach a website. When a visitor comes to your site, their intention is to take some action on your site. Don’t make them to struggle to figure out where to do that, for example where is the contact form if it hiding in the footer or a link else where, it is hard for the visitor to find it and take an action. When a visitor comes to a website he has the assumption of having the logo on the top left and navigation links either on the top or on the left hand side of the web page if you displace it somewhere else, it would be hard for a visitor to find it. Thus you may lose one potential customer or a sale.
2)Website Colors – Colors can attract a visitor or distract a visitor, Simplify your website design with between 2-4 color palettes. This will save you time as well as make the web layout simple and slicker look.
3)Fonts – Limit your set of fonts to the visitors, It is recommend to stay with common web browser fonts like Aerial, Veranda, Courier, Times New Roman and Georgia. The whole idea of having a particular font is to read it clearly for the visitor, if the font is good and the content is not interesting to the visitor there is no point in having a website. Readability is key while choosing fonts, black text on a white background is always advisable while creating a simplified website design.
4)Plan a good website structure – If you build a site without a set plan you will have difficulty in redesigning the website or adding content each and every time. Plan your site layout well ahead, for example if you think the navigation is likely to grow in future you need to structure your navigation links on the side rather than on having a horizontal navigation unless you have a drop down menus. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) could come to your rescue if you want to make changes now and then. CSS can really create wonders in your website layout design and I always recommend any web designer to have built the site using CSS.
5)Consistency is the key – As I say at the first principle, don’t make the visitor to think what to do, all the inside pages of the site should have similar layout and not different from the homepage. Otherwise the visitor will be confused again where to find the right link or contact us form. Consistency is key while you design a web page layout.
6)Using Irrelevant pictures – I have come across several website using non relevant image for their site but their content is completely different from the images. The images should reflect the content of the page and not flashy graphics. These kinds of website which have good relevant images converts better.
7)Browser compatibility – With the ever growing of browsers every day make sure your website is compatible with all popular browsers, This can be done easily if you use CSS properly. CSS should be the web designer best friend while building a website, this helps in maintaining and redesigning of web pages easily.
All the above principles have mentioned above is just common sense and all web designers are aware of this, yet so many webmaster divert from these principles and suffers bad consequences in their website design.
If you have any specific questions about our web design tips please email us, No portion of this article can be republished in any form if you are interested in getting an free article for your website(should be a web design, graphic design, logo design or seo company website) please email us at webdesignerhouston@gmail.com