Quick Tips for a Beginning Web Designer

A web designer always keeps in mind lots of things. If you are a beginner and just starting your journey as a designer, here are some quick tips for you to learn at an early stage. And for all those who have a little more experience in designing websites, this list may become a reminder of some important aspects of a web design process.
Most of the lessons you will get from your work experience, but there are some aspects that a beginning web designer should keep in mind just to know what to start with and in what direction he should move as a beginner.
You may or may not know (or agree with) the tips below, but we hope the mentioned aspects will give you some basic ideas as to designing a good-looking and fast-loading website for your web project.

Ready? Let’s start…

Select colors to touch the emotions

When choosing colors for a website, the web designer takes into account the character of the website audience, the color spectrum of the presented brand and the info that should be carried down to the website visitors.

It is important to choose right colors, because it is a powerful means to touch the emotions. Of course, you know that color creates an emotional and physical reaction of the visitors.

So, here are some tips that may help you to choose a color scheme for your website:

1.It is important to make a contrast among the text and background color. If you wish the texts on your website be easily readable and good for eyes, use contrasting colors.
2.You may use intense colors to attract the visitors’ attention. But try not to make the color scheme too intense, as the techniques will lose its effectiveness in this case.
3.Use enough colors not to make your design boring, but not too many colors, as you risk to go too far in an attempt to make your website attractive.
4.For the best impact, use one color for header and footer, and another (a complementary one) for the text field.

Use readable and good-looking fonts for your design

Can you remember how many times you clicked out of a website simply because of the font used for its design? Imagine a bright pink Comic Sans on write background. Cool, yeah?:) So, the advice is not to use fancy fonts that are not displayed on some computers (in this case the system will use a default font, what it even worse). Try to use professional easily readable fonts like Verdana or Arial.

Design your website for all resolutions

It is a really important aspect, because you need to make a design looking good for all screen resolutions: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, and higher. To use percentage, not pixels for that is the best way.

Use images moderately

It’s not good when a website is overloaded with bulky images that load for ages. As practice shows, simple designs are the most effective for the web. You may instead think out a creative design for the tables or add some small catchy elements to your design. Just re-think the image content and modify it to make it more user-friendly.

Use white space wisely

White space is the space between different elements of  a design: images, texts, headers, footers, links, etc. Wise use of white space makes the visitors feel comfortable when browsing through the website pages. Our task is to make the pages free from clutter by balancing a few elements that will appear on the page to make the things look separate.

Here are a few quick tips to get you started to use white space effectively:

1.Make white space between lines in paragraphs not too close and not too wide to each other for easier readability and scanning.
2.When working with margins (the space around a particular element of a design), keep them consistent throughout your layout, and don’t make them too large or too little. You may use CSS Margins to control this space.
3.When it comes to headings, look at the space above and below them and decide how scannable the text is. It is much easier to understand about this type of space by visiting a website with a good heading structure.
4.The space between images and text means much for a design. If the words are too close to the picture, the content will be hard to scan and read. By placing a picture and text too far from each other, the post loses its flow.

Your website should load fast

You can create a brilliant design, but if it loads slow, the website content will make no sense. It’s good when a website loads not more than 15 seconds (for static websites). Flash sites, of course, take more time to load, but that is a payment for interactivity, intuitive navigation and stunning design effects.

So, what may help us to build a website that loads fast?

1.Minimal use of images. Did you notice that top websites like Smashing Magazine, Google, Amazon, etc. have very few images. For them the loading time is more important. But of course, we have to take into account the website’s assignment.
2.You may include simple neat icons into your design instead of big images.
3.Optimize images by picking the right format: the images with solid colors are the best saved in GIFs, and the images with continuous colors (like photos) are best saved in JPG. Also, you may use online tools like Gif Wizard for optimizing your images.
4.Try to play with CSS styles to add some effects to the text — you may get some really nice effects by using a simple HTML.
5.Check your website’s loading time by using online tools, for example, NetMechanic.

Don’t forget about SEO

A web designer should always keep in mind the basics of SEO when designing a website. We advise you to learn this subject more detailed, because SEO should always be one of the essential components of your web design process.

Check for errors and broken links

After you have finished with the website design, check it for errors. Proofread the text content carefully, as nothing can be more disappointing in the website content than errors or mistakes in the text. Also, it is important to check the website for broken links. If you use Dreamweaver, you can do it by using the «Check Links» function there. Also, you may use online tools for that.

What are your web design tips?

If you have some usefu tips to share with us, kindly leave them in comments.