When creating a website, there is a lot you need to consider and a vast range of different criteria you should be trying to fulfil. There are any number of tips that can help you to polish and improve your site to this end, but if you don’t start out with the right attitude then these will generally be ‘too little too late’.
One of the most crucial tips in web design then, is to start from the ‘bottom up’ and to build your site on the best foundations. What do I mean by this? Read on and find out how your web design could be so much better…
Bottom Up Versus Top Down
When you create a website, you do so according to a number of hierarchical elements. You will be trying to make certain that your site looks good, that it fits its niche and represents your business, that it is easy to navigate, that it provides the necessary information etc. If you attempt to accomplish all these things though with no sense of order or sequence, you may find that you end up making something of a mess as you attempt to serve multiple conflicting ‘masters’.
Forming a hierarchy then is crucial so that you can ensure your site is built from the ground up to satisfy the most critical criteria first. At the same time though, you also need to ensure that you get this hierarchy the right way around. Don’t think first about the way your site looks and then about the way it functions for instance – or you will end up with a site that doesn’t fulfil the most critical of its roles.
To build a great site then, you need to start from the bottom up and start with the most fundamental goals. You might then ask yourself the following questions:
What is the mission statement of my/our business?
What is it that we hope to achieve as a company?
What role does our website have in helping us to accomplish this?
What does the website need to offer in order to be able to do this?
How can we ensure that the website offers these things? What elements does it need?
How can we ensure that the website is easy and intuitive to use? (Across all devices?)
What should this website look like in order to provide a good user experience?
What should this website look like in order to attract visitors?
How else can we promote this website?
Start out by asking these questions and making sure that these are the questions that motivate you in that order. This way you will ensure that your site works on the most fundamental levels and you will have a clear direction for every subsequent design decision.
When deciding what colour to make your links then, you would think first about your business and your mission statement. Which colours speak about your company and match your existing branding? From there you would make sure that your links were easy to use and then that they looked good. This is much better than choosing colours that look great, but that don’t work in the larger context of your business and are tough to spot for visitors…
The contributor of this article, Dan Richards, is an employee at Antelope Web, providers of web design services in Connecticut. Dan loves art and can frequently seen at all latest exhibition openings.
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