Useful Web Design Tactics To Improve Your Site
In today's tech oriented world, nearly everyone has a website in some form or another. Although it's good that these sites exist, many of them are lacking in design quality and could use a makeover. The following article contains a few web design tactics that can improve the visual quality and overall functionality of a website.
Most websites that people create will become filled with content that will clutter the site and make it harder for users to navigate. The essentials of a site are the only necessary components and anything else is just frivolous extras. In order to reduce the amount of unnecessary items, use the 80-20 rule. This rule states that for the items on your site, only display 20% of them, and this 20% should be creating 80% of the site's useful functionality. Since only 20% of items are being displayed on your site, users will be able to focus on the items that allow them to find information or accomplish tasks on your site without distraction. What is considered useful and distracting may vary between sites, so experimentation and calibration will be necessary.
In addition to having cluttering content, websites sometimes feature too many pages. Many of these pages are unnecessary and only serve to make the site more complicated than it needs to be. This can be solved by elimination or merging. You can eliminate pages that don't contain any useful information, or are just plain obsolete. If these pages contain useful information that you may need, then you can merge them with pages that contain similar content. An example of this would be combining an "About Me" page with a "Contact Information" page. Keep in mind what you want to do with your site when you are deciding what to eliminate and merge.
In any website, one of the most important areas is the fold. The fold is the portion of a website that is shown before scrolling the page down. Since this is the first part of any website that a user will see, all of the important information and action button should be located in this area. This includes sign up and login buttons, as well as navigation menus. The header height and other elements of your site can be altered to allow exactly what you want in the fold.
Although it is often overlooked, color choice plays a role in the appeal of a site. A site with too many color schemes acts as nothing but a huge distraction. At most, your site should have 2 to 3 colors, with slight shade variations on different areas of the site. When your site features less colors at once, the site looks cleaner and more organized, giving allowing users to focus without being bombarded by a rainbow.
Websites have become common, and so have their design flaws. Don't let these flaw plague your site and scare away users. The web design tactics from this article should help your site reach its full potential.
