How to Give Your Website a Professional Look
July 17, 2009 by Admin
Filed under Web Design
Six-Mix strategy for a successfully designed webpage
The basic elements and principles involved in web designing are actually true for all other types of designing as well. If you want your website to be easy-to-navigate and aesthetically attractive, you must make sure you keep these the following elements and principles in mind:
1- Balance consistency
Web design balance can be defined as the uniform, equal distribution of the heavy and light elements on each web page. There should be a visual balance throughout the page, not only in the initial view.
On the basis of balance, a website can be of three types:
Symmetrical website: In this type, all the elements are placed in an even fashion - a heavy element on the left is matched with another on the right.
Asymmetrical website: In this type, all the elements are placed in an odd fashion by varying the texture, color, positioning and size of the text, images, buttons, bars etc.
Discordant website: These web sites are off-balance and suggest action or motion, so you can create a discordant design on purpose. This type of designs make viewers uncomfortable or uneasy, so they are best used for sites that are intended to make people think.
2-Develop contrast or matching
Web design contrast or matching is all about colors, shapes, sizes and even textures. You can take full advantage of contrast by changing font size, weight and family to provide textual contrast and varying sizes of images and elements. However, be careful not to blast your readers or scare them off with contrasting colors which are way too loud. The links on your content should be contrasted well to draw most attention. Similarly, if contrast is not your flavor, you can also match the colors, images and shapes with each other to produce a beautiful matching impact.
3-Create color themes
Having a good and suitable color theme on your web design will give users a pleasing experience while surfing through the web site you designed. Remember, te, having a white and blue color theme gives you a clean and corporate web design. Orange and yellow are warm and friendly colors, Grey is cool, combining a Orange-Grey theme will give you a friendly and fun mood. Dark colors are also popular among many, because they easily matched other bright colors.
4-Maintain unity (Site’s proximity)
Web design unity consist of all the similar elements in the site alike and those diverse further apart, and pulls everything together into one integrated whole. Unity is achieved through the proper placement in your layout. You can implement this in many ways. You can, for example, adjust the layout of your elements to put them close or far away from each other. In the body of your page, you can change the spacing around the text in your page contents. You can further achieve unity by playing around the box properties and change the margins and padding.
Remember, your web site has only about 4 seconds to make an impression on the visitor. This means that if your web design does not grab their attention immediately, they won’t stick around. And if your web site does not offer something of benefit, they won’t bookmark it and they won’t come back (more on that later).
5-Apply KISS rule
Remember the golden rule; “keep it simple and short”. Don’t bombard your website just for the sake of adding the “glamour”. Instead, keep the content and the graphics simple and yet attractive. Many visitors often get lost somewhere in a “congested” webpage and never come back. The first glance at your website should tell your target audience that it does have all the “benefits” that he or she is looking for. Also, if you’re running a e-commerce website, make sure you adopt the “you” focused approach and put whole emphases on “benefits” your customers will get instead of the “features” your products has.
6-Entice your audience To keep your website ready and running, you have to give your visitors reasons to stay and browse your site, to bookmark your site so they can refer to it again and to tell others about your site so you can build new visitors. Three simple ways of doing this are:
i) Offer something valuable and interesting: e.g.
1. Newsletter / blogs / articles
2. Free tips / advise
3. Monthly coupons / discounts etc.,
ii) Good, quality Content
1. Put action into the words of your web site.
2. Remember, the Internet is made up of web pages and for the most part, pages are meant to be read.
iii) Easy to use web site navigation.
If visitors can’t get around easily on your web site, they won’t stay very long.
Adopting these simple but time-tested rules will not only give your website a true, professional look but would also draw more and more of your desired traffic to your pages.
