Website Design Considerations
Simple Guide to Website Design – Part 2
Foreword: In this part of the series I explain the basic considerations you should make when designing a website.
By: Chrysanthus Date Published: 27 Dec 2015
Introduction
Guide to Web Page Design
- Choose a major layout first for the page and code the major layout.
- Choose the body element background color or background image bearing in mind the color of most of the text for the page. Code the background.
- Choose the color of all the texts. You should not have many colors. Many colors will make your web page too busy (see below). At this stage, you should choose the color of the heading elements’ (h1, h2, etc.) text, color of paragraph text, color of hyperlinks text and color of any other important text.
- Code the rest of the page, adding all text and necessary images and video clips and audio. So far as minor layout is concerned, if you respect all the CSS rules that you have learned in this professional course, and the principles of the HTML professional course, you would have at least reasonable minor layouts for each major layout partition.
- You can optionally add special effects like borders, shadows, rounded corners, element backgrounds and any other special effects. These special effects should not be many. Many special effects will make your web page too busy (see below).
- You can finally optionally add animations (see later). The number of animations should not be many. Many animations will make the user loose focus on the intention of the web page.
Not too Busy
Beauty does not necessarily mean variety (a lot of variety). Look in your own life and you would realize that many of the things you consider as beautiful do not necessarily have variety of colors and/or variety of special effects. If you deliberately put variety (many) of colors and/or variety of special effects on a web page, the web page would become too busy, in the sense that the web page would not convey any particular message. In other words, the web page may look meaningless. Have you ever noticed beauty in anything that is meaningless? No.
Some of you may argue here that you have seen beautiful dresses that have many colors. What you should do is to look at such a dress again. You would realize that the colors of the dress form a pattern and the effectiveness of the beauty is in the pattern of colors. Hardly, would beauty ever mean so many colors and/or so many special effects. If you are still not convinced, then I will challenge you here: Does a beautiful woman have many colors? So your web page should not have many colors (should be less than 20); your web page should not be too busy.
Above is a guide to CSS web page design. Here is a guide to CSS website design. It is simple. All web pages of a website should have the same major layout with the exception of the home page whose major layout may be slightly different. That is, the home page can have more or less the same major layout like the rest of the pages in the site or simply just have the same major layout. In this way, while the user is at any of the pages in turn, he would know that he is at the pages of the same website.
Remember, above everything, each web page should be functional, so you must make good use of your HTML knowledge (behind the scene).
That is it for this part of the series.
Chrys
Related Links
Basics of HTML 5Basics of ECMAScript
HTML DOM Basics
CSS Basics
CSS Rendering for HTML
Simple Guide to Website Design
CSS Multi-column Layout Module
Media and CSS
Responsive Web Design
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