When it comes to web design, attention to detail is one of the most important things to look at and one of the keys to making a successful and attractive site. The point is that while your overall design might look great and might be essentially appealing, forgetting a few of the more minor details and overlooking some of the aspects you might not notice right away can undermine your good work and end up putting your visitors off. Here we will look at how you can improve the look of your site drastically by making some of the smallest changes.
Font
Font is something that many of us won’t even give any thought to, assuming that the default font that most browsers will display will be more than good enough for our needs. However adding a nice font here can make a big difference and if people find your writing more pleasing on the eye then they’re more likely to stick around to read what it actually says.
This is particularly important when you are thinking about designing logos and banners. Using a ‘default’ font on your logo can make your product look highly unprofessional and like it was made by an amateur rather than someone with a lot of experience in design or a large company with the funds and means to have a real logo designed.
Of course deciding on the size of your font is also very important, and this is a fine line to walk between text that is too small and hard on the eyes and text that is too large and looks ‘childish’ as a result.
Links
You also need to decide what you want your links to look like. Are you going to make your visited links a different colour to the regular ones? Are they going to be underlined or bold? If you’re using a contextual links ad network, do you want these to stand out as different or are you going to make your links the same colour? Leaving the links as their default colour and appearance is another lazy oversight that can make your page look unprofessional and ugly, whereas making them look more impressive and click-friendly is a great way to get people to see more of your site before they leave.
Borders
If you use a regular looking template for your site design then this will normally mean that you have spaces down either side of your main content with a ‘strip’ in the middle for your images and text. Deciding on how large you want these strips to be, and how much of the screen you want the middle part to take up is important for creating the optimum amount of space t work with and at the same time focussing attention.
Which Way Your Images Are Facing
When you take a photo of someone to use on your site, which way round do you get them to face and where do you place the image? It’s the sort of thing we are likely not to think too much about, but actually there’s a lot of benefit in getting our images to face ‘in’ toward the content as this can help to draw our eye into the centre of the page rather than away from it.
Johnny Reed is a retired web developer, who has been actively blogging about the advantages of an attractive webpage. For more details visit www.yarraweb.com
