6 Basic Page Layout Rules When Designing Your First Website

Designing your first website is relatively simple giving CMS’ like WordPress and ready-made templates. What’s difficult is designing it the right way. Yes, everyone has their own opinion about what looks good, but there are certain rules that, if followed, will make your website both practical and appealing to most users of the web. So when designing your first site, keep the following rules in mind:

• Read Right: Web pages that are easy on the eye are the ones that entice visitors to stay longer. Font colors and size, background colors, the graphics used – they all matter a lot when designing a website. It’s an obvious fact that text of a darker color on a lighter shade background is the easiest to read. Some websites allow their visitors to set fonts and background colors according to their choice. Make sure you don’t go overboard with graphics and .GIF files. You may be patting yourself on the back for conjuring up fireworks on your site, but the average visitor is not too impressed with too many floating and changing icons on the screen.
• Navigate Neatly: The links on your site must be clear and visible. Organize the content so that visitors are able to find what they’re looking for without having to click aimlessly around your site. Placing content where it’s supposed to be and not at random locations on your site will get you more than just nods of appreciation.
• Casually Consistent: Set the design aspect of all your pages according to a standard or theme and stay true to this theme no matter how badly you want to experiment with others as well. Your site must look and feel like a well-designed and authored book that the visitor cannot put down.
• Download Deftly: With time being a valued commodity, visitors are not going to hang around indefinitely waiting for your page to load. So make sure your pages are free of time-consuming graphics and special effects that delay your page load. Visitors are also not too thrilled to have to download third party applications to be able to view your site.
• Easily Error-Free: Although the grammatical errors in the text on your site are a blot on the page, the worst thing you could do is adopt a slipshod attitude about the links and graphics on your page. Make sure that all links work and lead where they’re supposed to; ensure that your page loads right instead of behaving erratically because of errors in your HTML code. Make your links reflect the right color codes depending on whether your visitor has been down that route or not.
• Behave with Browsers: Web pages are peculiar in that, because they’re written in HTML, they’re client-oriented; which means that each visitor sees a different version depending on the browser of their choice. Make sure that your pages are validated so that they’re presentable and readable in all browsers.