A website can have valuable content that people want to see, but a poor design can send readers away from a site as quickly as they come in through the search engines. A good design, on the other hand, keeps visitors on your website, making them more likely to visit again the future and tell their friends about it. When designing the layout of your website, you should work with the goal of creating something that is simple to use and has minimal distracting elements. Read on and learn the ingredients that make up a good web design.
Legible Text
Unless your website is a photo or video gallery, the text is the most important element. Visitors should be able to spend as much time on your website as they like without straining their eyes. The text of your website should be large enough to read without squinting and should have a color that does not blend with the background. Black text on a white background works well for most websites. Divide your articles into paragraphs and subheadings so your visitors can easily scan or skim through them.
Compatible Colors
Feel free to be creative in selecting a color scheme for your website, but avoid choosing colors that clash with one another and distract the reader from the content of the site. If you have chosen a combination of colors that you would never wear, you may want to try a different color scheme. Pay attention to your favorite websites and the colors that they choose, or adopt one of the many free downloadable website color schemes available online.
Tasteful Animation
Animation can add visual interest to a website, but too much of it can take a reader’s attention away from the content. Some people dislike website animations so much that they install Web browser add-ons to disable Adobe Flash. Also, some devices like Apple’s iPad, do not support Flash at all. Therefore, you should avoid using Flash for a key element on your website’s design or navigational structure. If you must use extensive animation, consider giving visitors a way to view a text only version of your website.
Intuitive Navigation
If your website needs a Help page to show users how to find the content that they want, its navigation system is probably too complicated. A visitor should know how to navigate your website the first time that she visits it. Because you are the designer of your website, your navigation system might make perfect sense to you even when it would not to a new visitor. Before you launch a new site, ask several impartial people to look at it and tell you whether they find the navigation easy or difficult to use.