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Whether you are designing a website for your friends and family to keep up with your kids’ growth and activities, or setting up a large retail website with a complicated interface, there are certain basic principles that should be followed in order to make your site easy to use and keep visitors coming back. No matter how needed your service or how many people want to read what you have to say, if your website design is not easy on the eyes and simple to navigate, web surfers will quickly click away.
First and foremost you should determine what the goal of your website is. This will be the deciding factor in which elements to include and what visual design will be best. Web design is about customizing your website to the user’s needs and wants.
If, for example, you are creating a webpage only for friends and family to view, you will not need to put many complicated functions into your web design, nor will you need to worry much about keywords or maximizing your website’s chances of being found by a search engine.
If you are setting up a business website, your web design will need to incorporate colors, style, and functions designed for the people who need your products or services. Carefully consider who that audience is and what sort of web design that would attract – and keep – their attention.
Have you ever visited a website that made your eyes hurt and your brain go numb? Think about the things that bothered you about that type of web design and avoid it on your website. These typically include things like a cluttered and disorganized appearance, colors that clash or are too hard on the eyes (black or other dark colored background with white or colored text fit into the category of highly annoying web design), as well as too many graphics intensive elements which cause the page to load slow.
Conversely, a web design which utilizes too little information or visually appealing elements can be boring enough to drive a website user right on to the next website. It is best to stay away from designs which use only a white background with black text and have nothing interesting to maintain a website user’s attention. In addition, website under construction notations – along with those cute little construction graphics – scream amateur. Do not make your website live until the pages are completely ready to be used.
All websites, no matter how small or personal, should look good on any monitor setting. If you aren’t sure if your web design is compatible with all common settings, go into your own desktop display properties and reset the display to different sizes to see if you have any adjustments to make in your web design. Having to scroll to the side to see an entire webpage is extremely irritating and is another quick way to drive users away from your site.
To ensure that your web design is friendly to its intended users, look it over in the mindset of a webpage viewer to see if it is a site that you would feel comfortable visiting. If so, you have done a good job with your web design.