Cohesive Web Design

At this moment, there are approximately 20 billion web pages and with each passing moment, more and more pages are added. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you get found, but how do you get trusted? Websites are a marketing tool. With any marketing tool, the goal is to get people to hire your business. If your website is trustworthy enough, visitors will pick up the phone and call.

Design continuity with a minimal color palate will look professional and instill trust. It will give the impression that the business as a whole, not just the website, is cohesive and goal oriented. This is a part of design psychology and color theory. These elements may not be recognized consciously, but subconsciously, these elements together will trigger something in the visitor’s mind that says, “Yes, this is a trustworthy business” or in my case, “I feel comfortable with this web design business representing me online.” If all the web pages of the website are designed uniformly, it will look consistent and part of a whole rather than dissimilar sections. Let us see how continuity in design can be achieved:

What does the visual design communicate?

In an overzealous attempt at designing, are you overdoing the fonts, colors and graphics? To maintain continuity in design, avoid use of too many fonts, colors, and graphics. In short avoid making the design too garish for the viewer. Fonts in different size should be employed to emphasize the primary information. But, if you are going to overdo it, then instead of complementing each other, different fonts and colors will start competing with each other. The result would be that the user will get distracted with the maze of colors and fonts. This way important content gets lost in the maze of graphics, and ultimately, results in loss of opportunity for the company. A best web design describes the website aptly, with minimum graphics and words.

Understand the principles of design

A website should be designed from user’s perspective. What will the user see when he/she browses through a website? Is the design able to convey effectively, the purpose of the website, the utility of the website and what action is expected of the user? If this underlying principle is kept in mind, the web design will be effective.

Let us have a look at some of the tips that would ensure continuity of design:

• Be sophisticated and let the web design be original.
• Try to be unique, by maintaining an exclusive style which complements your business motto.
• For images make use of GIF files whenever possible. These are faster than JPEG files. In any case, avoid graphics that are not in tune with the content and theme of the page.
• Make use of plain backgrounds. Ensure that the text is printer friendly. Too many patterns in background hamper legibility.
• Always provide alternatives to your users. Let the users enjoy the preference to offload the visual display. If there are no graphics, is your website still easy to understand?
• Avoid designing very big pages. Each page should be less than 50K. The layout of the page should be similar to the newspaper, that is, have a horizontal and vertical page layout.
• Maintain a normal frame and a page should be only two or three screens long at the most. Having to scroll horizontally can be irritating.
• Instead of using stylish fonts, use fonts that are legible to the readers.
• The users may use different browsers. Therefore, ensure that your website is compatible with all the browsers.
• Your website should be user friendly. Frames make it difficult to book mark web pages. Hence, avoid them.
• Do not undermine the importance of white space; use it.
• Ensure that the website is compatible with all operating systems.
• Though your revenue comes from advertising. Do not let the advertisement occupy too much of your space. Ideally, your web page should not have more than 15% advertisements. This is to ensure that your web page is not overwhelmed by advertisements.

Designing Web Pages

Do not treat each page separately. Rather, each page is a part of the website and should appear seamless. Look at the web pages as parts of a jigsaw puzzle, which should fit into each other to get the complete picture. For this, remember the following points:

• Place the navigation bar at both top and bottom of the web page so it becomes easier to navigate irrespective of the part of the web page – top or bottom – the cursor is located. The top and bottom navigation should be placed at the same location on all the pages. It is necessary to have a site map to facilitate ease of navigation to the users.
• The color scheme, layout, text fonts, links and other elements of a website must be consistent.
• Have a look at popular sites and see where most of the sites are placing buttons. Do not try to experiment with placing the buttons, as the users would be accustomed to the conventional locations of buttons and bars.
• Surfing between various web pages should be easy. The user should be able to easily flip through various pages of website.
• The user should be able to reach different pages from any web page. Most of the users land on the web page through search engines. None of the web page should reach a dead end.
• The web pages should indicate to the user clearly the desired action. Hence, the links should not be hidden under the page, but must be displayed prominently.
• Ensure that the text mentioned in the link gives a clear and discernible description of the contents of the linked website. Thus, if the link is about wedge shoes, the text link must clearly mention so.
• Check that the links are not broken.
• Conventionally, links are displayed in blue underlined text. It’s best to follow convention. If you decide to deviate, change the link color but do not underline text that is not a link.

Avoid Heavy Graphics

Many designers invariably design the websites with heavy graphics. They generally tend to add lots of high tech designs to the website, not all of which may be required. Hence, after designing the website, the designer should revisit the designs and check whether all the elements are necessary and do away with anything that is superfluous. If graphics are needed, see that the images are small. Also, ensure that the graphics sync with the context of the website. If the website is about canines, you cannot have an image of a soccer player.

Having too many graphics will reduce the speed of the page. The user may lose interest, if the page is too slow.

Remove unwanted elements

If there are any unwanted elements (from the view point of the website visitor), they should be deleted. It is often observed that too many graphics make the user wary of the website. Therefore, to bring about consistency in the visuals, any element that is not adding value to the website should be eliminated.

Continuity in designing is the most important factor in retaining the interest of the users in the website. Keep this principle in mind, to keep users attached to your website. Your web page design portrays you. Therefore, take due care while you design the website.

Tagged as: web design