Design of Your Website – Some Theory
When first building a website, you need:
1. Content… content is king.
2. SEO (if you want traffic)… a complicated, and ever-changing process.
Most people get good at the two above… but the design is where the hard part comes in, and is essential if you are planning on building a website designed to directly sell a product, or to retain visitors on your page, and have them coming back for more.
Now design is only partly about looking pretty… nice… good… whatever you want to call it. A simple, clean, and original design enables the visitor to get the most information out of visiting your website without information overload.
Information overload is a killer, and its easy to see many examples of it on the net. For example, here is a website on solar energy facts. It is a great resource, but is on a very long page and you have to dig to find what you want. An example of a website offering similar information, but with a well thought out design can be visited here.
The color scheme is neutral (keeping the reader from feeling overwhelmed) and is quite concise… so the reader doesn’t have to search around to see if what he needs is even there. A toolbar at the top with a well thought-out, intuitive menu adds a significant amount of information to the readers fingertips… without making the reader search for it.
Here are some good resources for web design theory: