5 Es­sen­tial Things You Should Aim For When De­sign­ing Your First Site

You need to for­get about the fact you don’t know how to de­sign a web­site from scratch.

If you’re us­ing con­tent man­age­ment soft­ware you don’t need to know much be­cause they make every­thing easy for you.

If you want your web­site to look a cer­tain way you just need to click a few but­tons and it’s done. Even if you want to do some­thing com­pli­cated you can just pay a free­lancer to carry out the one job for you with­out hav­ing to com­mit to a multi-thou­sand dol­lar job.

I hope you feel bet­ter now be­cause your web­site will def­i­nitely look great, but there are still a few es­sen­tial things you should know be­cause they could re­ally help you out.

When a pro­fes­sional is de­sign­ing a web­site there are some things they aim for to make sure the web­site will look great and func­tion prop­erly. You should keep them in mind when­ever you do any work on your site.

Use plenty of white space

Don’t be afraid to use too much white space be­cause you can never have enough. You start to get prob­lems when you stuff as many things onto a web­page as pos­si­ble. Peo­ple have a hun­dred dif­fer­ent things to choose from and they don’t know what to look at.

White space is also a lot more re­lax­ing and peo­ple will be able to read your ar­ti­cles more easily.

Make your text legible

If you look around the in­ter­net you will see some ter­ri­ble sites with il­leg­i­ble con­tent. This is usu­ally be­cause the web­mas­ter does­n’t think things through.

Please make sure you don’t use tiny text be­cause peo­ple don’t have amaz­ing eye­sight like you. The text should also be as dark as pos­si­ble be­cause it’s eas­ier to read. Grey text might be hip, but it’s def­i­nitely not cool.

I won’t bother men­tion­ing the font style be­cause I know you will choose one that is easy to read.

Set a goal for each page

When you de­sign each page it’s al­ways a good idea to have a spe­cific goal in mind be­cause it means you can fo­cus every­one’s at­ten­tion onto it.

• A land­ing page is a good ex­am­ple of this be­cause the sole pur­pose is to get some­one to give you their email address.
• A sales page al­ways tries to get some­one to buy a product.

You can do the same for every page on your web­site if you think about it care­fully and it’s pos­si­ble to make more money if you get it right.

Make every­thing easy to find

Great nav­i­ga­tion is cru­cial and it’s ob­vi­ously much eas­ier to set every­thing up be­fore you get started.

Just get a huge piece of pager and lay it out on a desk. Try to imag­ine what your web­site is go­ing to look like and split it up into sec­tions. Un­der each head­line you can write down lots of sub-head­­­lines. You can go as deep as pos­si­ble, but even­tu­ally you will have some­thing you can repli­cate on your site.

Make sure the most im­por­tant pages are the eas­i­est ones to find.

Use lots of pictures

It’s hard to spend a lot of time on a web­site which lacks vi­sual con­tent be­cause you can get bored pretty easily.

If you want to stim­u­late a vis­i­tor’s mind you should go out and find some lovely pic­tures to use in­side all your ar­ti­cles. Hope­fully you can draw too be­cause it means you can cre­ate your own pic­tures. They don’t have to be per­fect, but as long as they are dif­fer­ent they will stand out and peo­ple will en­joy look­ing at them.