This Little Piggy Went to Your Website: Considering Design Elements

When people talk about website design, there are quite a few pieces that make that puzzle. Some think it starts and ends with determining a color scheme, adding a logo and throwing some images and content on a page. At a high level, this is somewhat the case. However, when you start getting into the nitty gritty of it all there are quite a few more things to consider.

Today I, your cyber web slinging friend Simon, will go over some of these other elements.

First Things First

First and foremost, we must determine what type of devices our visitors will be using when visiting the website. Right? The short answer is… Sort of. Although it is nice to know the types of devices you are serving to, you no longer need have a separate desktop and mobile designs.

There is No Respect of Devices

Responsive web design (RWD) initially started at the desktop level then responded appropriately as the screen size gets smaller as on your tablet or smartphone. The Issue was that in order to slim the site down for mobile, important content sometimes had to be sacrificed.

“So now I must sacrifice content for my mobile users?”

Nope. Enter mobile first design.

RWD and the Mobile Chi

Mobile first design does RWD keeping the mobile users in mind first. This strategy ensures that all the important content is in the mobile version and then works back up the screen resolution sizes making it available to all.

To be perfectly honest, we harp all the time on how important content is to SEO. This becomes more apparent when you learn that Google will ding you if your mobile site is not up to par. Don’t believe me? Look at Google’s mobile first indexing page and you will se the first commandment is thy mobile site shall contain the same content as thy desktop site. True words.

This means that your site should be more content driven than anything and you should assume your customers will be viewing your site on their mobile device.

“I don’t think my site is mobile friendly”

*GASP* You need to meet with us… Now… You can read the rest of this blog later. Seriously, click here.

Brand that Bad Boy

If you read my first blog in this series, you would know that branding is sort of a big deal. It is how people know who you are and what you stand for. It spans across all aspects of your culture including your website design. In a sense, website design is an art form and there will always a sense of creativity, but this creativity should never come at the cost of not adhering to your brand.

I also talked in a previous post about ThyeBuiltItFoYou.com and how they like to share the thunder by intermingling their brand with yours. Sure, for a cost that can be removed but then you are stuck with a template that is still being used by many and therefore not promoting your individuality.  In my mind I why not take the cost I would be spending monthly and just get a website that is specific to you and your brand?

Just some food for thought.

All the Pretty Colors

If you do not have a set color palette, now would be a good tie to come up with one. It doesn’t matter if you are talking website design or interior design, colors and design pretty much go hand in hand. In website design, as with any design field, there needs to be primary and accent colors. Webbin’ It has a specific palette that we stick to for our brand and, although we play with some shades here and there, we stick to these three colors.

Too many colors become distracting and yet too few brings the risk of being bland. Most will suggest two or three colors that can be carried out throughout the design. What’s more important is that whatever scheme you choose carries through your virtual and non-virtual realms.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Another distracting thing is too much clutter. I like to call it website hoarding. We have all gone to those sites where there are multiple columns of texts, images, text and images, and more texts and images. I mean it is so bad that you feel like you are experiencing cyber anxiety from it all.

Don’t fear the whitespace my friends.

We as a people are becoming more of a minimalist when it comes to our taste in web design. Give us the important information and do it in a clear and concise manner. This also ties back to your brand. Do you want people to relate your company with chaos or something more sophisticated?

It is whitespace, in conjunction with font type, images, and killer copy that will set you apart from the masses.

The Tale of Two Ilities

Here is a little story that I like to tell to about legibility and readability. You have enough whitespace to make you visitors get their Zen on, color scheme and images that would make Picasso stop and take notice, and content that will make them believe you are a literary genius. However, no one wants to stay and read with that Comic Sans font you are using.

Your content will speak for itself, you do not need to be over the top here to make a point. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a little flavor. You just need to keep the artsy font specific to headings, but even then, it should be legible and readable.

Where Do I Go from Here?

This is a very good question. Where do we go from here? Your navigation should answer that for us. Some people think that navigation begins and ends with a menu bar, but that is just not the case.

True. The menu bar should be simple, and leave no doubt where clicking that link is going to take you. However, your content is a story that should be leading, or navigating if you will, your visitors to conversion. This is done through very a specific call to action (CTA). You know, the buttons that take you places like mailing lists and other web forms. Much like this CTA to get you to check out when our next Webbin’ It Wisdom will be.

Main Blog Page