Basic Tips for Designing a New Website
Launching a new website seems like a simple enough task to most people. All you would need to do is buy a basic hosting package, install a free template and just customise the site a little bit. However, there’s a lot more involved in a great website design than just installing a free template. Many of the world’s leading companies hire private website designers and pay them large chunks of money to create their pages. Now in 2017, the design landscape has changed drastically, and if you want your website to succeed in this day and age, you will need to incorporate modern trends into your website. Here are some important tips for designing your new website in 2017.
Use a Style Guide
Using a styling guide is a great idea; they are already quite popular in the modern publishing world. Styling guides are basically large books that are used by media agencies to ensure that they maintain a uniform style with all of the content that they publish. This includes minuscule details such as the way things are labelled to the way numbers are written by the company. One of the greatest examples of this was the style guide that Google produced for its new Material Design displays.
Get Rid of the Side Bars
If you talk to any leading designer who specialises in offering web design in Manchester, the first bit of advice they will give you is to phase out the side bars. Side bars used to be a pretty big thing at one point in time. They offered additional navigational options to users by offering them direct links to popular content or recently visited pages. However, it wasn’t long before people realised that the trade-off was much bigger. These side bars created clutter and significantly reduced the usable area on the site. Surveys showed that very few visitors actually used these side bars, so it is in your best interests to remove them altogether. If your site doesn’t absolutely need side bars, there’s no need to have them at all.
Use Larger Fonts
Typography plays an important role in the way your website looks and feels. Bigger typography isn’t anything new, but it’s definitely one of the best ways to make a statement. Expect to see more sites that use bigger fonts in 2017. Use a minimum font of at least size 18 for the text in the body of your page so that it makes sense.
Use Space Efficiently
Effective utilisation of space is a very important part of the overall design of your website. Rather than clutter every inch of space on your website, try to create as much empty space as possible. Known to designers as negative space or whitespace, it’s important that you leave parts empty so that people get a respite. Providing too much information within a small, confined space can lead to an information overload, leading people to believe that your site is too cluttered. Use space efficiently to ensure that your website looks good and the design looks appealing.