Web Design.
Great taste makes great design. Acquiring great taste takes years of hard work and experience. This is apparent by how many poorly designed sites with lots of money pumped into them fail, while simple yet brilliantly designed sites by small businesses with almost no budget flourish.
If you hire a designer based off of your budget you’re destined to fail. Taste comes with a price. Designers know this. You can hire a run of the mill web designer who will do an o.k. job for you. But the designer who is a trendsetter will launch your site to the forefront and force the competition to follow.
If you can’t afford top notch talent, at the very least, learn what makes a great designed website.
Oh, know what, I’m going to help you do that. Just keep reading.
What Makes a Great Website?
There are so many elements that contribute to great web design. Choice of color, typography, layout, navigation, functionality and proper planning are all necessary for a professionally competitive website. Additionally each one of these elements needs to be carefully researched and analyzed in order for all parts to flow naturally. A stunning successful website design is a combination of it’s look, feel usability and the purpose it serves within it’s genre. If you have all these elements, there is no reason your site should fail.
It’s All About Style.
There are many different styles and approaches that can be used to achieve different results. Apple for instance, is the king of beautiful minimalism. They know how to showcase a product and not crowd it with other elements that may distract from their overall focus. E-commerce sites need to pay attention when focusing their efforts on one product. Apple is a good model to follow in that regard.
Organization is another element of style. If you have an editorial or publishing site, having a newspaper or magazine styled layout works best because thats what readers are accustomed to. CNN has recently re-designed and structured their site, which made it easier to navigate and find articles and sections quicker.
Color That Makes You React.
It is has been psychologically proven that certain colors evoke different emotions and responses. This is proven not only in web design but in everyday life. With that said, DO NOT STRAY FROM THE NORM; unless you are an artist creating an experimental site, stick with the proven methods out there. Many companies have spent millions upon millions of dollars researching these types of behaviors of color choices to the width of pixels surrounding a table. It may sound a bit ridiculous, but your online presence is big business. Benefit from what others have done by flattering them in the highest regard — copy them. Yes, I said copy them. Not line by line, but color scheme is open game. Use their marketing research budget as your own. Google has had internal arguments about different shades of blue for table lines, so it can get kind of crazy. Find a successful website, not in your genre of business, and use their color scheme.
Layout is More Than Rows and Columns.
Two columns, three columns, minimalist, magazine style; there are so many choices to choose from. If you’re selling a physical product, you most likely want a layout that focuses on that product. Find similar e-commerce models that are proven to work. You may not be the next Amazon.com, but there’s no hurt in trying. Stay away from too much filler content and keep it simple. Simple and clean is always better. Less is more, get what I’m saying? Again, I’ve seen companies overkill their home pages with too many products and too much text that confuse the consumer. Highlight the best seller; make the rest of the products easily accessible and you will have a winner.
Navigation, Do You Need a GPS to Get Around Your Site?
Can you get from point A to point B easily? The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, not three levels of navigation. Your top level navigation should be intuitive and make sense to what it is linking to. Keep it to 3-4 sub navigation links max per top level navigation link.
The lesson learned here, keep it simple, clean and use proven methods.
