Posted on March 26th, 2010
Web design can be described as the visual aspect of a web site and how it is perceived by users – as unattractive or attractive, and difficult or easy to use. Design is related to aesthetic and artistic factors; getting it right relies on people’s creativity, and guessing when it’s right draws on people’s individual experience and taste. You’ll find no hard-and-fast rules on determining a good-looking design. It may drive some people crazy sometimes, but a lot of things in life – like good wine, fine food, love, and of course good web design – don’t operate entirely by specific rules. If you’ve worked for years in Web design, you may have learned many Web design tricks. Rather than relying on the formal and specific rules that are written in books.
Principles mentioned in this article may yield good results for most Web design projects. Certainly, it’s a good idea to begin with popular models that most people think look good, but at certain times, it’s OK to break common rules. The web design process can be a challenge to anyone’s sanity, however matching and mixing web elements is a good way to consistently develop designs that are useful and look great.
Achieving simplicity
It is essentially the hallmark of a good web design. Internet users are trained to appreciate and look for unornamented, simple designs. Use the simplest forms that can accomplish your tasks, and then determine how to simplify it even further. For Web design, achieving simplicity means putting as few of everything – graphics, design elements, and text formats – as reasonably possible.
With simplicity you’ll have a few advantages; as a matter of fact, the download time factors and the variations among users’ computer configurations make simplicity necessary. The fact that only a limited amount of details present in a Web page mean that a simple Web page usually loads a lot faster than a complex one, and users genuinely like fast-loading sites.
The variations among users’ computer configurations reward simplicity as well. A user can be opening your Web page on a smartphone; another on a netbook; another with a 24″ 120Hz LCD screen. A simple web page is more likely look similarly at different computer configurations.
For novice Web designer, simplicity is particularly essential. They don’t have the hard-earned experiences of having tried and failed on many things.
Beginners also lack the technical skill to always do things perfectly, especially when they are trying something complicated and new. The more they keep things simpler, the more likely they’re not to mess up. Achieving simplicity is most crucial in content pages, the pages where users is reading the latest news or looking at pictures. They don’t want to be distracted with many unnecessary things.
Creating predictability
With predictability, users can easily speculate where things or information on your Web page are and how they work. Put differently, one of the most important goals in Web design is to accomplish a sense of predictability for your users, both in functionality and layout.
One meaningful reason that the internet is so widely popular is that Web sites nearly all work and look alike. Web sites that are very unique (in a bad way) tend to be rather unpopular with users. To understand more about the meaning of predictability, think about what a Web site with newspaper articles in it should look like. You may expect to see an attractive picture – at least one picture. You should also expect a big bold headline describing an article. You may expect to see some navigation links along the left side or at the top of the screen. You may expect an ad across the top and at the side.
On a few sites you may find features, such as buttons for printing and e-mailing the article, somewhere at the bottom of the screen. And you will also see a small box on latest or most popular articles. Now what do you think if one of those features is implemented much different way from what you usually find on other web sites. For example, imagine that the “Print Article” button is placed at the top of the page and bigger than the headline, you’d be confused and frustrated.
In a nutshell, that’s the basic concept of predictability. For any Web site you create, find a couple of examples on other sites to find workable and effective forms. See whether your site is similar in functionality, layout, and content.
Producing consistency
All of your pages should be both predictable and consistent. You shouldn’t dramatically use different text size, fonts, or layout styles within a page compared to other pages.
If your Web site is simple, and if they are predictable to average internet users, consistency will become an easy principle to follow. These are just a few ideas that can significantly improve the consistency of your site:
1. Use the same header graphic or navigation block on each page at the exact same position on every page.
2. Use a consistent foreground color and background color, the same font and text size for your content, also the same writing style on each page.
If you set up a bigger Web site (over 25 pages or so), maintaining consistency can be harder. The only foolproof way to create a consistency is to use a common template for your entire site: it includes content pages, navigational pages, login pages, and so forth. Popular sites, such as Wikipedia.com, and sites with CMS engines automatically “populate” the page with format and style drawn from a single script to create predictable and consistent pages.