The design element of a website is sadly sometimes not given the credit it deserves; in many cases it is actually overlooked. This emphasizes the point that a lot of people are involved in web design but how many of these people know the true meaning of designing a successful website? Think about it this way, if you intend to send out leaflets to your customers or if you are hoping to attract new customers to your business with the use of it and the leaflet was of poor quality, this would reflect on your business, making people think it is also poor quality. Well a website acts in exactly the same way that this leaflet does, which is why you need a good quality website with the correct positioning and layout to attract people to do business with you.
A lot of people are under the impression that a good website is one that has all the latest technology and uses pretty much nothing but flash, well I doubt it very much if I am alone in the opinion that this really isn’t the case. In fact to create a website that will give a lasting impression you need to concentrate your efforts in a different direction. It is this direction that takes you to the structure of your site and how you place aspects on your site; it is these points that will really make your website stand out from the crowd. For example if you have a headline, photo and caption and you place all of these items in the center of the page like this;
Headline
Image
Caption
You may think that it is visually appealing when in reality this can be very boring and isn’t doing anything for the overall layout of your website. The reason for this is there is no hierarchy; your eye doesn’t flow down the page correctly. However with just a small adjustment you can change this;
Headline
Image
Caption
The above is a lot more visually appealing as the eye is drawn from the headline right the way down to the caption; you are viewing the elements of the page in the order they were intended. This is the type of basic web design you need to keep in mind; you need to think about the placement of elements of your website as oppose to just placing them anywhere. This is the type of thing that good web designers ensure; they don’t allow the position and placement of their designs to occur at random.
One of the main aspects associated with basic web design is deciding where certain things should feature on your web page, to do this correctly you should ask yourself, what the element is that you want to place on your site, how this element relates to the overall goal of the page and where said element fits in with other elements of the page. If you do this and you spend time generally thinking about how you intend to design your website before you actually start building it you will create an excellent site that visitors will want to return to again and again. Basically if you are able to engage your customers through a compelling design then you have done half the work already when it comes to getting them to do business with you.
As I have previously mentioned one of the main areas of basic web design is all about placing elements in the correct position on your website. The first thing that helps you do this is knowing what the element is. For example a heading would always come before an image or a block of text. Another example is the navigation of your site; the general place that this is found within your website is top left or top of the page in the center. It generally runs across the top of a site underneath the logo. There is a logical reason for this, which is that for one it is common knowledge that this is where the navigation bar will be and secondly it is the most convenient place for your visitors to access the part of your website that they want. If you start moving the navigation because you think it will look better elsewhere you can say goodbye to new visitors as no one is going to stick around on your site if they don’t know where they go to navigate around it.
You need to be careful where you place elements on your website as everything is significant and all of the elements are needed to pull the design together. For example something as simple as drawing a line after a headline runs the risk of disconnecting the article title from the actual article. If you have an electronics website you need to make sure the title is definitely associated with the content underneath.
The location of various aspects of your website is something that you should put a lot of thought into. Your logo should always be placed at the top of the site along with a contact phone number. Obviously you can still have a play about with where you place aspects on your site but an image with no caption or an article with no headline with confuse your reader so think along these lines when it comes to the presentation of your site to make sure not only you but your readers also get the most they can out of your website.