Interesting tips to designing effective websites

October 21, 2006
Anybody who runs a website will be faced at one time or another to redesign his site. I have myself tried my hand at redesigning this site with varying degrees of success - though you can plainly see that there is a lot of scope for improvement.

But does designing websites require following a series of pre-charted steps ? Or is it a process which require little if any planning - one where you just jump in and start modifying the code ?

It appears that most, beautifully designed websites are the result of careful planning and forethought. Designing websites can be divided into 9 separate steps. Them being :
  1. Know what you're doing.
  2. Know what the site needs to do.
  3. Know what the site's visitors want.
  4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site.
  5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios.
  6. Organise views into a site map.
  7. Sketch the essential features & look - This is the time you use a graphics software such as Gimp. But using only pen and paper is also equally effective.
  8. Map your visitors' attention.
  9. Arrange the visual elements to work together.
You can read the details of each step at this well written article at Web design from scratch - a beautiful site with good articles pertaining to web design.

And if you are wondering which is a good book to pick up the essential skills in XHTML, CSS and Javascript which are pre-requisites for mastering the art of web design - I would highly recommend you check out the book Web Design in a Nutshell which is well into its third edition having sold over 200,000 copies so far.

1 comments:

  • EvgeniyK

    Then may I suggest an improvement? ;-) Make links more distinguishable from ordinary text, for it's hard to tell where one can click in the text, at least on my LCD display it is.