It’s really a very time-consuming task selecting an appropriate web design that suits your needs. I hope to brighten the stress for some of you and give you an insight to which design templates work best for certain business types and personal websites. I will take you through components of a basic and common design layout.
Some people make the common mistake of jumping straight in and choosing colours and fonts, i am just not saying this is a bad thing to do, however, this should be seen as a lower priority dark web sites than other design elements. The main reason for this being, If you needed to change the design colours and fonts at a later stage it would be a much easier task than changing the structural layout all together. Therefore it is a better idea to first focus on the overall layout of the design.
Choosing the designs main regions
The best thing to start off with is selecting the main regions to be used in the design. To do this imagine your design to be tinted sections or blocks (squares and rectangles) that have no content or images within. Start from the header and move down to the footer of your website. It can be useful to draw down these sections in writing to give you a better view of how everything is going to look at the end.
So let’s start with the header, you will need to decide whether or not you are going to have a top navigation. If you have one, placing it in the top right hand side is recommended. Next would be to select an area to place a static header image or slideshow and finally where to place your company logo (the top left of your design is recommended as this is the initial thing people might find when visiting your website). You can also add a second top navigation under the header image if you have a lot of content to distribute. Make sure that you do not clutter your design as this will deter users and potential clients.
Once you have your favoured header it is time to move down to the main content area of your website. This should be pretty sel-explanatory but you may want to add a left or right navigation, once again only if you have large amounts of content. To reduce clutter you could possibly use expandable menus or drop downs on your navigation. I would not recommend this for smaller personal websites.
If you are not adding an extra navigation in your content area you might also use the space for promotional graphics. When using promotional graphics don’t make them too extraordinary as there is nothing worse than bright colours and big capitalised text. The best approach (if you really must add promotional graphics) is with something fairly small and simple just enough to attract the attention in our visitor but not too much that they feel forced to click the video. Alternatively you could just use static images to liven up the design.
Moving about the footer of the web design. It is best to make use of this area by placing most of your website and social media links here as well as any other additional links to specific areas. A popular practice is to section off the footer into 2-4 articles, this provides a clean look and can be fabricated quickly into many variations.
Choosing the right font for your design
Now you have the design layout in place it is time to purchase a nice legible font. When selecting the font for your sentences it would be wise not to use ‘Times New Roman’, most people find this font harder to see on a web page. Two good fonts that we use for sentences are ‘Arial’ and ‘Trebuchet’, ‘Arial’ being the favourite. For the header text you can choose from many different fonts, some fonts I have used for headers are ‘Delicious’, ‘Opal’, ‘Arial’, ‘Rounded MT Bold’ and ‘Myriad Pro’. These headers can also be fabricated to the colour theme of your design.
Choosing the right colours for your design
You probably have an idea of what colours you want to use already, although you may replace and change them round often to get the desired look and feel. This is a good thing to do as colour picking can occasionally be a difficult thing to get just right. Choosing the right colours for your design mainly fall on the profession of your business or personal service, using the right colours will represent the correct message to your visitors. For example it would be far better uses basic pastel colours for a lawyer website and not bright vivid colours. Now and again this may work depending on the design and its goals.
On a more personal selection I have chosen to use blue and a little green on my website with various shades of monochrome. Note that pure white usually successful on websites online and provide a more large look but pure black is not as favoured, it tends to achieve the same effect when trying to mix different colours of paint with black, all you get seeing is the black! There are however a few websites where black has been used successfully.