January 23, 2011

Choosing Your Look

There are, literally, millions upon millions of possibilities for how to make your website look so that it not only reflects you or your company, but offers the best experience to your visitors. This results in more visitors and more revenue for you. If you choose a look that is really neat but hard to read, you will alienate visitors and lose revenue.

Here are some tips on what to do and not to do when it comes to website design.

Background

If this is a business blog or website, you want to go with a light background such as white. This always makes it easier to read black lettering. If you choose a dark background you run the risk of it being too dark for the reader to stick with for any length of time, as it's harder on the eyes to read white lettering than it is black. Also, choose background images carefully because they can slow down the site and make the text hard to read in some areas.

Text

Make sure your text is easy to read and does not conflict with the background of the site at all. Also, when creating text links, make those in colors that will stand out to a small degree, don't use a color that is too close to the text color because people will not be able to see the link very well. Lastly, keep the font to a size that is easy to read but not so big that it looks odd, 10pt or 12pt is about the size you want.

Layout

The first thing you need to remember about web design is that people are coming to your site for information and they do not want to spend time trying to figure out where the important stuff is located. Make the layout easy to use and follow. The more, shall we say, interesting, the layout of the site the harder it can be to figure where stuff is.

Graphics

Keep graphics to a minimum if you can. This, of course, does not apply to product images, as people will want to see those. You don't want a lot of unnecessary graphics clogging up the pages and you really want to stay far away from animated gif files. These are normally very poorly done and convey a sense that the site is run by an amateur.

Mark

Posted by Mark at January 23, 2011 1:43 PM

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