Some Basics of Web Design

When you decide to start up a website, or even redesign an old one, there are some basics of design you’ll want to keep in mind. Everything from the appearance, to the navigation, down to the coding. When you look at it as a big picture, it might seem like a little much to handle at first, but keeping a few things in mind will help you skate through your new web design with ease.

The New Look
This is probably the most fun part of the design (at least it is for me), but it can very easily become the wrong kind of design for your site if you’re not thinking too much about it. Don’t get me wrong, you may come up with a beautiful design, but it might not be right for what you’re trying to project.

It’s important to think about your audience. What is your product/service and what are you trying to convey with your new website? It’s much like print design, where you have to assess your target audience, and then design pertaining to them. If it’s a site for a kid’s toy or food, make sure everything is fun, bright and cheery. No, the children won’t always be the ones looking at the site, but parents are going to feed right into the marketing strategy. You want them to believe what you’re offering. Comparably, if your site is for a vineyard, you’re probably going to want to use rich colors, resembling wine, with elegant type. Your design will have a lot to do with the existing logo, or a logo redesign if you’re so lucky. Making sure everything matches is really the bottom line.

A little something to keep in mind when redesigning a site: If your site has been up for a long time, and people are used to going to it quite frequently, keeping a similar color scheme and layout might be appropriate. This is not set in stone, but sometimes ‘freshening’ up a site might be all it needs. Updating the logo and making it sleeker might be what it needs. Of course if the site you’re working on is complete chaos or doesn’t appear to have anything to do with what you’re offering, a completely new design might be your best option.

The Navigation
Make sure when designing your website that the navigation is straight forward. I really can’t stress this enough. Have you ever been to a website where you’re confused about what to click on? Nothing is obvious, and all you want to do is find contact information or something simple? University websites are notorious for this, making it more difficult to get around than it ever should be.

One thing I always think about when I am designing the navigation for a site, is what my professor in college told me. Always give the user at least two ways to get to one spot. If you have a line of navigation along the top of your webpage, it’s not a bad idea to put it along the bottom as well. You want people to be able to click through your website without being confused.

Oh, and another thing… make sure your links are consistently placed in the same space on every page. It can change a little bit from page to page, depending on what your site is, and what section you’re in, but you should always be able to go to the same place for the same type of link. Don’t have all of your links at the top through 80% of the site, and the other random 20% they’re along the side. People get into a groove, and you want them to stay there, instead of having to relearn something along the way.

The SEO
A big part of designing web pages is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is something you actually want to emphasize more than even the design. A lot of people overlook this part because they get so caught up in making it pretty, where the SEO is really what brings more people to your website. The design is important, don’t get me wrong, but there are a lot of ugly, ugly websites out there with amazing SEO, and therefore get many more hits than ones with savvy designs.

Here are a couple quick SEO tips:

• Add a title=“title of image” and alt=“description/title of image” tag to all of your images (non-design based – the little golden bar that separates each article does not need say “Gold Bar” when your mouse rolls over it). Don’t make your title and alt tags the same as the title of your article, that creates bad SEO and some engines with read that as duplicate content and pass it up.
• When creating your article’s title, it’s much better if you name the url after the title, and not some crazy number code. For instance, if you look up in your address bar, this article’s name is obvious, called “/some-basics-of-web-design”. If you are sure to separate the words by dashes, then search engines can read them (not to mention the users).
• This may not seem SEO-ish, but make sure your images are not too many, nor are they too big (file size and visually). This helps keep people on your website and keeps them coming back. If your site takes too long to load, not many people are going to stick around.

If you want some more SEO information, check out the other site I write for, MySEOBlog.net.

When you’re sitting down to brainstorm your new design, you should keep all of these at bare minimum these tips on design, navigation and SEO in mind. You won’t all be doing the coding part of the design as well, but it helps the person that is, if you are thinking about them when you’re doing your part.

If you’re a little lost about how something like your navigation should look, go to some of your favorite websites! There’s nothing wrong with getting inspiration from someone who did it right. Start looking at what they did for their SEO, and their design. Does everything they’ve done reflect what they’re trying to? If not, make note of it and find one that does. Just be sure you don’t steal anything from a site, you want yours to be original.

Topics: Design, SEO, Site Navigation