Design (Layout, colours, etc.)
What is your site going to look like? What will it feel like? What will it say to it's viewers?
Consider your company's existing stationery, company colours and logo. Unless you want to change them, or are willing to have your website present a totally different face, you'll want some consistency.
Visit various websites, especially ones in your industry. For example for each site you visit, think about the following characteristics:
| Characteristic | Comments |
|---|---|
| White space |
White space is the amount of space on your website that isn't filled with text or images. The more white space, the more "arty" or simple your site will tend to be. Conversely, the less white space the more "busy" and complex. A good balance is important to achieve for your site's goals. |
| Font type | Well, fortunately or not your choice of fonts is rather limited anyway. Why? Because you need to make sure that the fonts you specify are loaded on most computers. If not, then your website will just look ugly and nothing will fit. Your browser should display different fonts in the following list:
This site uses Verdana, then falls back to Arial if the user doesn't have Verdana, then to Helvetica and then to generic sans-serif If you really want to use a font that isn't common, you can, but it we discourage it because it is no good for search engines and it makes it hard to update your content. |
| Font size | As you can see from the above example, the font type you use can mean big differences in how much room your text takes up and how easy it is to read. Verdana is large and widely spaced and so is a very digestable font whilst Helvetica is thought of as very mathematical and compact. |
| Colours |
Yellow is a thinking color. Green is a fresh, natural colour. Red is an energy colour. It can mean anger or action. It can drive your reader to do something. Red and black , or yellow and black are danger colours. Strong, solid colours or pastels or vibrant, energy colours can all be used to excellent effect to attract or divert attention, help focus the reader is an area or drive people away in droves. |
| Images | Images can really make or break a site. How and what sort of images used? |
| Variance | Are the same fonts, colours and types of images used throughout the site? |
| Square or Free? | Is everything in neat, well organised blocks, or are things placed anywhere? |
| Movement | Is there movement on the website? Does it have banner advertising, for example? Or a long message presented as a series of messages? |
To help in evaluation, draw up a table something like this and fill it in using 5 or maybe 10 websites:
| Website | Score | Like | Score | Don't Like |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| http://mandtwd.marcsnet.com | ||||
|
http://www.abc.net.au |
||||
The score might be out of 5 where 5 is feel strongly where 1 is barely. For example, if you really liked the colours on a site, you might give it a 5. However you do this or grade it is up to you.
At the end of this process, you'll have a very good idea of what you want your website to look like.