Web Design Tips: A Few Pointers for Keeping the Online Office Tastefully Decorated
Digital Marketing • 13th Apr, 16
Sure, sure, once your business is properly established – once you’re heading up a celebrated brand that’s fast becoming a household name – you’ll be able to snag a whole team of well-trained folks who’ll dedicate themselves to ensuring that your online presence is polished, pretty, and professional-looking.
For now, though, that’s a responsibility that falls to you. And sure, it’s a bit of a hassle; but it’s also a prime opportunity for you to form a full and thorough understanding of the image that defines both your site and your brand; to watch it grow, and, with all you’ll learn about web design, to grow along with it.
So, just to help you lay out the groundwork for this journey of growth, here’s a few web design pointers for beginners – not years-at-art-school level stuff, perhaps, but enough to keep you away from mashing together a mess of Geocities layout and Comic Sans.
- A Well-Mixed Palette
Basic stuff, of course; but it’s basic because it’s so damned important to get right. Sure, sure, by now, most of us know that a pink background and purple links don’t communicate the essence of a financial planning company too well; but still, sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the importance of the more understated aspects of colour in web design.
Most importantly, once you’ve starting putting your company’s website together, you come to realise just how deeply important it is to pick the right logo. After all, you’re not just committing to an image that everyone will immediately think of when they hear the name of your company; you’re also committing to a colour scheme. If your site’s colour scheme doesn’t match the colour scheme of your logo, it’s going to look slapped-together. People see a slapped-together site, they see a slapped-together company with slapped-together policies that provides slapped-together service.
What’s more, even if you go for the quieter, more businesslike colours, you’ll still want to make sure they guide the user’s eyes. Going for a white-and-green colour scheme? You’ll want to make sure that the green, being the heavier colour, goes places you want the viewers to look – the links, the promotional text, the signup section.
Colour’s a powerful weapon. Don’t flail it around clumsily.
- Room to Breathe
Space. You’ve got to give your users space. There is, if we haven’t already made it clear, a profoundly strong link between the modern customer’s perception of your site and their perception of your business – and if they see a cluttered site, they’re going to imagine a cluttered office cluttered with employees with a cluttered workload they don’t know how to handle.
Thus, when you’re laying out your site, you can’t let yourself forget the importance of giving users room to breathe. Maybe you do have a whole host of awesome information to share about your company; but if you put it all across in the form of a page cluttered with paragraphs, most users aren’t going to take in any of it. Get your information across, but bit by bit, with every piece of information given enough space to allow the user to focus on it, and it alone, without giving something else for their eyes to wander toward until they’ve finished it.
Space is deeply, deeply important – aside from avoiding clutter, the last thing you want is for potential customers to feel intimidated. And if anything’s going to intimidate them, it’s heaps of words crammed together. A customer wants to feel in control, and that means feeling fully informed about your business, but also having the option of taking in that information at an easy pace.
In short: space. Give them space. You wouldn’t want potential new clients wandering into your officers and immediately encountering a lobby cluttered with junk, right? Well, business sites are the new lobbies. Keep that in mind.
- Calligraphise
Fonts. Sounds rudimentary, doesn’t it? You’re not stupid; you know that a professional site can’t have Comic Sans within a hundred feet of it; and besides, who notices the difference between the more formal-looking fonts anyway? There’s only so many shapes you can give a letter.
Sure, it’s easy to think that way; and to some extent, it might be true. But IT-related knowledge is becoming more and more commonplace, and that includes its artistic elements. In other words, more and more people have an eye for – and an opinion on – different fonts. Exactly how useful that sort of knowledge is going to be to society in the long run is debatable; what’s clear is that, nowadays, should you swing for a free, generic font, there’s more and more folks out there who’ll notice.
Point is: swinging for a font that you have to pay for may seem like an unusual use of money; but in many ways, it’s a worthwhile investment. After all, regardless of the kind of image you wish your business to have, or precisely how you wish potential customers to see it, the one label that needs to be avoided at all costs is “generic”. Generic businesses appeal to no one.
Naturally, you’re not going to learn all the nuances and fine details of web design from a list – those absurd art course fees exist for a reason. But still, we do hope this’ll give you enough to kick off with – enough to ensure that, when your business finally grows big enough, and you’ve finally hired your first web design team, the sight of the current state of your website won’t drive them all to dramatic groans and immediate resignation.