5 Tips For New Web Designers

When many new web designers start off, it may be hard to choose what they are really working towards. Some designers will spend more time thinking about colors and shapes that are appealing to the eye than they will about what the point of the web site is and what they need to deliver to the visitors in a usable form factor. If you can think like a child and keep focus on the single purpose of the web site what ever that may be, this can be the driving force you need for your web site creativity alone.

If you are building a web site that is supposed to drive leads to a business, what types of design integration can be done to let the visitors know what the business is about and how can you make it easy for the visitors to get their information to the company? These are the types of questions that professional designers will ask themselves. If you want to come out with strong web site design, you must begin with an absolute purpose that has been defined right from the start. Everything else can evolve around this singular concept. Remember above all else, you are designing the site for the reader, not for you!

From a web design standpoint and from a reader (viewer) standpoint, less is almost always more. If you spend too much time filling in all the blank space on a web page with widgets, gadgets, bells and whistles you do nothing but overwhelm and most likely will confuse the web site visitors more than it will truly help. Yes, you always want to make the most of your digital real estate and in some cases to much white space make a site look empty. Google is a great example of the "less is more rule" they have never filled there homepage with useless images or content of any type, they focus on serving the visitor and providing an excellent search experience and nothing else. By removing distractions from a web page you can turn on a spot light to the areas that you want to be noticed.

Instead of filling it in with distractive content like counters and other gimmicky content you can use the white space as part of your design. One big consideration of a great web design is choosing how to move the reader's eye around the page to the areas that you want their attention. Using white space can be very powerful void to redirect a reader's attention in the right direction!

The logo of your web site is a very integral part of your design and can also be one of the areas that people go a little overboard. If you consider some of the most successful logos of all time, you will find one thing in common and that is the simple yet memorable designs. If you spend a lot of effort making your logo all flair you can also run into trouble with making your logo a distraction to the visitors on your site.

If you start with simple line art it is best. The reason for this is that you may eventually want to use the logo on business cards, t-shirts or other printable media that many colors will not work well with. When you are adding colors to your logo design, make sure to use solid colors that can be easily reproduced also. Simple logos with up to 3 different colors can help make the future of your web site and branding your business much easier down the road.

When you are setting up the design for your first web project you may online be using simple html and have not studied the advanced features of CSS style sheets yet. If this is the case, it is even more important to lay out a set of guidelines for yourself to follow. A set of fonts, colors and other standards in which you plan on implementing on your web site. As a rule of thumb, 3 is the magical number. Never use more than 3 colors, 3 fonts, or 3 sizes of text on a single web site. This is easier said than done, but if you are building a large web site the more times you break this rule, the more times your visitors will notice and the more confusing it becomes to navigate the site. If you keep every page of your site consistent with the last, viewers know what to expect and can become comfortable with the look, feel and layout of what you have created for them.

Do not try to over complicate your navigation on the site. You want the web site navigation to flow smoothly and allow even the newest visitor on your site to flow from page to page and hopefully find the information they are looking for in less than 3 clicks. The easiest way to explain a winning navigation system on a web site is it should read like a book, each click should be logical in location and should send the reader to a more specific section of the book. If you can pretend you are telling a story to the web site visitor and think about asking "What do you want to do next?" you will have a great navigation setup that will be a helpful tool to your web site readers.