We are now going to look at the various elements of design that you need to consider when building your website.
It is important to remember that your site should be clean and accessible. A great starting point is to visit your bookmarks and note the websites that make the best impression on you. You will notice that a lot of the sites make good use of white space. This spacing between the different elements gives the page balance and makes it easy on the eye.
To get you started, here are the main ‘elements’ of your site that you will need to consider:
- Front-end Design - The actual look and feel of your site, its structure and branding. The number of sections you intend to have should also be decided – limiting a site to no more than eight content sections will ensure a good degree of focus (you can have more than eight ‘shop’ departments).
- Trading Platform - If the main focus of your site is a shop, then it will probably be possible to completely design the site within your shop solution. There may be some limitations on how the shop ‘template’ can be configured. If you are incorporating your shop with a new or existing front-end design you should double check that the designs can be matched.
- Payment Solution - You may want to integrate your payment page according to your site design; remember though that the level of freedom to do this is controlled by the payment provider so again investigate the flexibility of the solution you are choosing.
BRANDING
The look and feel of your site is all driven by your branding. When you get a website built it can often be the first time you have had a chance to sit down and plan your branding and colour scheme. Alternatively, it may be a good time to refresh your current branding. The following tips should help you create a dynamic new look for your business and your site:
- Logos - Think about what style you are looking for: Contemporary, Artistic, Business oriented, Futuristic etc. Write down addresses of websites that have logos that you like and that seem to match the style you are after. You could even save the logos to your computer (use right-click ‘save picture’) and view them all in a slide presentation to help make a final choice on what you like.
Colour is a key component in logos. In the eighties, Royal Blue was a strong corporate colour but this changed to red in the nineties. Think about how many colours you want in your logo, and what are they? Some companies use 4-5 colours to express themselves – eBay and Google are examples – but normally 1 or 2 colours are best.
If you still need inspiration check out all the logos of big business at this website; there is bound to be something that catches your eye: http://users.ncrvnet.nl/mstol/55.htm - Colour Schemes - With your logo chosen, you should have a basis for the colour scheme of your entire site. It is vital that you keep different colours to a minimum and make sure you choose complementary colours.
Consistency is everything and when you think about all the items on your website that may need a colour attributed to them, you will see that the devil is in the detail (i.e. logo, buttons, titles, links, background, image borders, back / next, dates…).
If you get the colour scheme right and leave enough of that all important ‘white space’ you will make an immediate impression on your customers. Good colour schemes show professionalism and care.
There is a neat tool that demonstrates compatible colours – it can even suggest different shades for you to try out. You can find it at: http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html.
We all know that we are drawn to things with aesthetic appeal; of equal importance is the relevance of that aesthetic appeal. The correct branding, colour scheme and navigation will quickly engage customers looking for your goods or services. A confident, clean website will communicate confidence and clarity to your customers. Design comes naturally to some people but by following the above advice it is possible for everyone to develop a first class online presence.
