What a wonderful day. Its Monday, rainy, and a bit chilly for August. Since its Monday it is my turn again to write another lovely post, and after trying to think of what I should write about for the past hour, I have decided. Basics to web design. Why do you ask? Well why not. I haven’t been designing too long, I’m actually pretty new to it. I’m in the process of designing a few sites and I figured I would share some of what I have learned (and hopefully learn something myself.)
When you are designing a website there are tons of thing to consider. Your background, your font, navigation, graphics, links, color schemes, advertising…….the list goes on and on. The simplest little detail can make all the difference for your site. Take the color gray for example. Gray is a very plain uninviting color, doesn’t bring emotion to your site, very neutral. Generally speaking gray is not a good color to work with, especially for your background. Your background should have nice inviting colors that highlights the page and does not make the text hard to read. Colors can be tricky, I recommend getting to know what colors mean and how they affect people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_symbolism_and_psychology) it’s pretty interesting stuff. Take this information in and use it to help your color schemes. It’s going to take some trial and error, but before long you’ll figure out the best color combination for your website.
The graphics you use on your site can also easily affect peoples opinion of your website. You don’t want anything to large that takes away precious space at the top of your page. They should be subtle and blend well with the overall flow of the site. Large images also take longer to load and slow down the load time of your page.
Font/Text: Texts that are hard to read, strain the readers eyes, or blend in with your background will frustrate your reader equaling out to not much time spent on your site. Your text should be easily readable. Make everything flow together and easy on the eyes. You’re not trying to give your reader a headache by reading your page.
Don’t forget about navigation. Navigating through your site should be easy and efficient. It should be accessible and consistent on every page. Navigation bars gives the visitor clues to where they are on the site. Now like I said there are tons and tons of information you have to take into consideration when planning the layout of your website. And your plan will change as you start putting everything together. The best thing is to build it as if you were the visitor. Would you like how the navigation is set up? Do the colors make the site look plain and bland? As long as you keep looking at your design through the visitors eyes everything should come together nicely.
August 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
way to dismantle our site design