When creating a website, one of the first things you should consider is the design. The design can make or break the effectiveness of your website. As a designer, there are certain things you should consider to keep the attention of your website’s visitors. Big, flashy backgrounds and animations can arouse their interest, but they are not enough to keep visitors going to the right direction.
To secure the effectiveness of your design, here are several dos and don’ts to remember. DOs Keep the page structured If you notice, more and more web designers are following the same structure and layout of printed media, simply because it looks more organized and coherent.
You can use great grid layouts and css files on your web site to achieve the same design. These grid systems, such as the 1kb grid, can help you build a streamlined and structured format to best showcase the content.
Put the spotlight on what’s important What is the main goal/idea you wish to convey through your site?
Your design should answer this question. If you’re building a website for an organization with a cause, make sure that is the focus of the home page. Other pages should support the gist of the website as well. Select the right color scheme Identifying which color scheme complements the purpose of your site makes it more effective and consistent.
For example, when making a medical site, use a color scheme that is lighter. You can afford to play around with solid, dark colors or the CYMK color scheme when creating a design for punk rock bands. For a personal website, you can use any color that reflects your character in line with the purpose of your site.
DON’Ts Place boxes everywhere You might have come across a website before with more than 10 boxes, all in different sizes and scattered all over the web page.
Did you stay longer than a couple of minutes browsing through it?
Probably not, this is because no visitor wants a whirlwind of craziness on their screen. Stick to a structured, aligned, and minimalist design that people will find easy on the eyes. Place irrelevant ads across the page We acknowledge that ads are the best way to earn money through a website, but placing too many of them will make a site look cluttered. Worse, visitors tend to hop on to the next website when they see too much ads in a single webpage. To avoid this, try to scatter the ads in all pages. Use twenty different colors Don’t splatter your pages with too many color combinations. At most, a color scheme should only have five colors. One site, Colour Lovers, shares user generated color schemes for you to choose from.
