If you are ready to design your website but you don’t want to have to hire a professional, you can utilize the same design principles to make it on your own. Thanks to availability of high quality design software, it has never been easier to make your own site and have it look professional. Here are a few tips that the pros use to make incredibly rich sites that engage viewers.
1. Color choice is paramount. The first thing you will need to do is pick a color scheme for your site. This scheme will include graphics, text and backgrounds. It is a good idea to pick an neutral color scheme that will appeal to a wide variety of users. Just remember that enough though you may like load, vibrant colors, they don’t always work on a website. Your goal is to make the text easy to read and the entire site visually pleasing. Stick with about four to five colors for the entire site to keep it looking professional.
2. Selecting the background. This is your palette for your site and the starting point for everything that will go on top of it. You want your background to be subtle and easy to read off of. Stay away from complicated images, particularly if they are not large enough to fit the whole screen. Tiled images tend to look unprofessional. A good rule of thumb to follow is a plain background that can be jazzed up with graphics. If you can’t easily read text off of your background, you will need to pick another one.
3. Stick with your theme. Once you develop the theme for your site, don’t deviate from it. You want your site to look pulled together in order for it to be professional. Pages that don’t match one another create visual discord in viewers and distract from the overall content. It is better to have a crisp theme that is carried throughout the entire site than to have numerous different styles infringing on one another.
4. Keep graphics to a minimum. Resist the urge to add a lot of cute graphics to your site. They are unnecessary and slow the load time. Stick to using your logo, any necessary pictures and if you sell items, product images. Anything more than that is just overkill. While it is fine to have a graphical header and a few accents, you will want to use as few images as possible throughout the entire site. The page load time should be no more than 2 to 3 seconds. Any longer and you run the risk of having your visitors lead before the page has finished loading.
5. Remember, navigation is key. No matter what you decide to do with your site, you will need to make sure that it is easy to navigate. Have someone outside your company, or a friend, go through your site before you take it live. If they have difficulty finding areas of your site, make some changes to ensure that your customers won’t get lost too.
Tags: background, color, design, graphics, navigation, software, theme
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February 21st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Neat, clean, and organized. “Simple is best”, and “Content is king”. Good read as always.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 pm
This is really helpful, I only know one of these secrets out of five which is stick to the theme you have chosen. The rest of the secrets mentioned are something new for me. I hope I can find someone to help me out in redesigning my site and fix the errors of it.