Website Design Principles

Many webmasters wish they could design great looking sites, but simply can’t. They’ve given it a few attempts, but either due to lack of application knowledge (with apps like photoshop), or lack of “artistic talent”, they give up. And that’s fine, because it keeps the market for design healthy! no, it really doesn’t have to be like that. If you’re an aspiring designer, there are a few key principles that I want to outline first. They are what helped me through my path to becoming a good designer, and they should help you too if you follow them.

Usability is all about creation the visitors knowledge a good one on your site. Things should be easy to read, easy to access and most importantly, easy to understand. When a visitor visits your site, they should know exactly what your site is about within the first couple seconds. This is obviously where design and layout come into play. You need to avoid cluttering your site in the physical sense

Do's and Dont's
One of the really big fads that was prevalent in the early part of this decade, was the use of small fonts. I was one of those idiots because I thought it “looked” cool. But for all practical purposes, I always scorn people for using size 10px or less for fonts. Never go below 11px font - and even 11px should only be used sparingly. Size 14px (which is what this is) seems most ideal for paragraph’s of text

Colors and Contrast
The color theme of a site is obviously important. A lot of aspiring designers have a tenancy to use too many colors, simply because they’re there. But I like using no more than 2 primary colors and a third “secondary” color that I will use carefully throughout the design. A simple color theme is easier on the eyes, easier to “comprehend” and overall just looks better

Contrast is hugely important. It’s very important that your content and navigation are correctly contrasted. The foreground text needs to either be very dark, or very light in comparison with the background color.

Design around the purpose of the site

Really make an impressive and effective site, you need to fully understand what the purpose of the site is, and what the goals are. The design should cater most effectively to the purpose.