A guide for web design beginners - In this article, I will write about some of the fundamentals that underlie the design you see everyday online on various websites. You can use this tutorial if you are a web designer, a developer or a customer just trying to understand what a good design is.
There are basic techniques and principles that anyone can apply to create better designs. Techniques such as layout, typography, images, designs, branding and call-to-action and are used to create other attractive designs.
There are many secrets about web design that you use on your website or on your client's website to create great designs.
Create beautiful layouts
Design begins with your content, but the first thing you need to do with that content is to structure it appropriately so that visitors see what they want simply. This is done through layout and composition.
A good layout is represented by your grid. Grid is the frame on which your frame operates and also provides your structure for all your content. If you've ever read a newspaper or browsed a magazine, you've seen the grid in action. Everything that defines the columns and spaces on the page.
Images through multiple columns while lines of text. But regardless of the case, the page elements are bound by this basic system. Between each column, there are often spaces separating the columns and this prevents text from being placed on top of each other and sentences running together. These spaces are called margins. Without them, reading the content in columns would be extremely difficult. There is a general rule: the wider your margins are, the more readable your text will be.
Creating a grid design is not as difficult as you think. You can create your own CSS grid or you can use the built-in feedback grids like responsive.gs, ResponsiveGridSystem, Skeleton, BootStrap or others that are best suited for you. These grids are free to use.
Typically, web pages have two or three columns. The right side contains some widgets, one in the central page contains content and sometimes it has many columns depending on the content type and the left column contains other gadgets. A complex system to create is the 12 column sometimes used for interactive websites like online stores or web applications.
So, there can be a complex underlying grid system but it's valuable because giving a structure and an order will improve the user experience. In addition, it helps you design because you have a structure where you can place objects along with a lot of decisions.
Unfortunately, creating a grid for a website is not easy for a printout where you know specific constraints like size. For the web, that is not the case. Websites can be accessed from widescreen to smartphones, etc. Add to that the fact that your browser can be opened to full screen or a small window. So you never know how big your grid should be. It needs to adapt to each dimension and this is called responsive design.
With the huge growth in access to the web through mobile devices, you must have a really good reason for your site not responding. But creating a responsive website has a number of challenges. That means your grid system needs to bend to support different screen sizes so your column becomes too narrow when you start to shrink it down so you need to change the number of columns you display.
For example, a mobile website may have a single column, while for widescreen there will be multiple columns side by side. This is difficult when graphics software like Illustrator or Photoshop insists on setting limits. That's why many professional web designers are designing directly in the browser or they are using a new generation of tools like Macaw.
You can check out Macaw to get started with a responsive web design. It's hard to get used to creating responsive web design especially when it comes to relationships between grids. So a good rule is to start designing for the smallest screen size and working.
Do not start by designing the desktop version of your website as you will be struggling to put on mobile devices. To help you understand exactly how responsive design works, you should look at a responsive website and see how it adapts as you scale.
There are online tools that allow you to see what the website looks like on different screens and devices. For the tablet version, the layout needs to be adjusted while the elements need to reposition themselves. For mobile versions, they need to reposition even more ways to adjust the layout.
You need to think about the stops, content and grid systems when you are designing the layout. Grid systems need dynamic updates and it must be designed around the content you try to display not around mobile devices.
See more: How to create an event registration website with WordPress
A good grid system will help you put structure into your website but it will not be necessary to help your users determine what they should focus on. For that, you need an intuitive hierarchy. It is mainly for visitors to see what is important and not too much. This is important in web design for three reasons:
- Extremely impatient users: They can immediately find what they want and then they leave. That is why you need to make sure that important elements are focused.
- We all suffer from something called paralysis of choice: For example, if you're in the supermarket and you find something good you like can be overwhelmed by the choice you have and maybe you give up, but if the product is on a special offer or put on a separate screen then you are most likely to buy it. Now the same thing is true for a website. If you present the user with too many options, it can be overwhelmed and leave. So you need a hierarchy to keep users focused on what works best for them.
- You need to guide users the options you want them to choose: For example, if you have a charity website, you'll want to focus on donations. If you sell software, you want to keep them focused on downloading. If you provide services you want them to focus on your contact form.
Hopefully, you now understand that you need to design and build your site around a robust grid and powerful visual hierarchy and you should not forget about responsive design. If you are looking for hosting services for your future website, I recommend you read our web hosting reviews, to find a reliable and affordable company.
In the first part, I wrote about basic web design elements like layout and grid. In the second part, I will write about using images and styles on your website. So you should know how to choose an image, where you can find a good quality picture, as well as how to edit an image.
Use relevant images and information
One of the most common mistakes people make is thinking of images as something to add interest to a page. Images should answer a user question. Therefore, images should be used if it supports content in some way.
Images should be used to convey a message and explain a difficult concept. For example in a template for a restaurant website, you need to display the food. These images answer a lot of questions for users like what food restaurant offers, food quality, what kind of food, etc. All of that without reading a line of text.
But the picture from the restaurant sample made you start drooling, it looks so delicious. Therefore, images will create an emotional response to selling your products and services. But be careful with this method, creating an emotional reaction can be a dangerous game because it can make people feel manipulated and that is never a good thing. Sticking to the image that really represents what you are selling. Selling a reality is well presented, but not an impossible fantasy.
Images that work well in print don't always work well online. When you view a printed image, you see 300 to 600 points per inch so the image is very sharp. Unfortunately, the majority screen is running about 72 points per inch, so this creates a problem with high images starting to break and looking like pixels. Plus, compressing images makes them download quickly, and this means that complex images don't work well on the web.
You need to keep the image sizes small because you want your web page elements to download quickly, so save your images in JPG format with the lowest quality possible without destroying images. Also, resize your images to the correct size. Alternatively, you can use an online compressor like compressor.io or TinyPng to save the files as efficiently as possible.
You need to look at a web-friendly image, create an emotional response and convey your message.
You cannot simply search for images in Google. Most images are copyright protected, so using them will get you and your customers in trouble. You can create your own image or create in Adobe Photoshop your own image.
If you have the budget, you can always use stock photography. Fortunately, there are many people who publish their photos under a public domain license and you can use them for free. You can use websites like Pixabay to search after images.
If you want to take your photos to the next level, think about creating a consistent theme on your images. You can apply color overlays or use filters to photos so you can create black and white photos or use other filters. Just cropping an image in an interesting way can make the image look great.
Please note, it's easy to go too far to add stronger filters or too much color overlay. You should try different approaches and give them to another designer to get some honest feedback.
Choose the right style, font, texture and symbol
All of these factors have a great impact on the design and feel of the design. It also helps you create content. There are countless ways to use style in your design and like fashion, it changes over time. Today flat design is most used, but in the old days, 3d fashion was popular.
Old Arial or Times New Roman are legible fonts, but they're old. To make a website stand out, you should use custom font families for headlines and text. You can use and embed free fonts from the Google Fonts folder. Always ensure that the text is readable while using custom fonts. Don't forget to check on different browsers and devices, as some fonts look weird on different web browsers.
Textures are used to add characters and it is also used to distinguish between different areas of the page. When it comes to texture, sophistication is the key. Most of the work done by the structure will be on a completely subconscious basis. You can find textures at exquisite site. Here you can find lots of packages you can use in your design.
Boxes, arrows, and dividers are an invaluable toolkit in your arsenal and it can help you group page elements and create a sense of structure on your site. Boxes and dividers are a way to emphasize the visual hierarchy. Note the use of arrows on many websites and explore their impact. All of these elements are kept in the same design, and they can also be used to emphasize important content. Boxes that can be used to draw attention provide a visual indication to see what is important and to say what to do.
Icons are used by many websites to support various options on their websites. Icons can be a powerful visual marker. Icons allow users to quickly scan the page and find what they are looking for and they are quite common so you don't need to know English to understand what the symbol represents. They can replace a long text or a large image. And this is very important when you are creating mobile websites.
The problem is that icons are often unclear if there is no text near them. If you only rely on symbols, you need to make them clear. So if you want to find icons, you can create your own or just visit Google and search for a website with many icon packs available to use. However, you need to be careful because icons have many different styles, so if you are using more than one icon on your website, you should make sure they match another one.
See more: Create a Sales Web
Conclusion!
Now you may find style to be subtle but an important role in your design. Boxes, textures, arrows and dividers give you a structure while icon sets can help scan your site more easily. Stylish impromptu character to your design. Combining all the elements, you can even express your personality and create a brand.
Regardless of the techniques and design elements you use to create your website, one thing is for sure: you need a good web hosting service. For starters, I recommend using ehost.com to start their website. This company provides affordable hosting services for both individuals and small businesses.
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