Website Design

Website design is often confusing for people attempting to create their first website. Often, premade layouts for blogging softwares or CMS (content management systems) are sufficient and don’t require much change.

However, many people eventually want to create their own layouts. Below are several basic components of web design.

Layout

Proper positioning of each aspect of your website is the first step. Often, there is a header, footer, content, and navigation space for the layout of the site. A basic layout is shown below.

Color Theory

Color theory is basically a theory that figures out which colors looks good together. Good web design ensures that the website is easy on the eyes, which requires knowledge of colors. Red usually attracts attention but is too bright for use on an entire site. Blue is the favorite color of more than half the population and is calming and soothing, etc, etc. You could write a whole book about color theory.

An awesome website for those who don’t know about color theory is WellStyled.com

Search Engine Friendly

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a huge buzzword nowadays. Essentially, you should create a site with easily indexable content, which means, flash and images that contain content should be swapped for interactive php, html and javascript pages. Meta tags are still important for some search engines although several major search engines like Google don’t use them anymore. Also, be sure the keywords your site wants to rank in are interspersed throughout the site, but don’t forcefully write tons of keywords as your ranking actually decreases because of that.

The most important thing is content. Content is king in the world of search. Although there are books and books on SEO, these are the basics that should be covered to make your site rank well in the search engines. The high quality links necessary for good placement will naturally come with good content.

Personal Touch

Your own personal touch is what makes your site special and makes it fit your site’s purpose! :] Have fun with it!

Coding Efficiency

Note: This used to be called Site Optimization, but due to the current popularity of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), people often confuse simple site optimization with SEO.

Site Optimization or Coding Efficiency is the practice of creating websites that load fast. This is definitely important so that your pages don’t take too long to load. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of super long loading websites that you’ve closed and decided not to visit.

Use abbreviations when possible while coding and try to keep the number of files to a minimum. This entails combining as many of your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files and PHP includes as possible. Keeping your image files at a low resolution helps too as well as avoiding large media files.

A good resource is WebSiteOptimization.com