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Editor's Notes
- Has this ever happened to you? You’re hard at work on a website design. Things are going great – you’re picking fonts, choosing colors, tweaking layouts – and in your mind your website looks something like this:
- (Gorgeous, right? Fun colors, easy, 2-column layout, happy fonts, interesting pictures, lots of whitespace.) Unfortunately, when you take a break and look at what you’ve actually created, you’re appalled to find that your site actually looks like this:
- So what is it? How do web designers consistently create websites that look good? What’s their dirty little secret?Well the secret is, there really IS a secret. And I’m going to tell you what it is:
- There are TONS OF RULES in web design. Tons. And the amazing thing? Most designers actually know, and follow, all of these rules.
- Clutter: (don't need to reciprocate every badge, keep them updated, define association versus dumping badges, etc)Too Long: (talk from a visual standpoint)(not sure what to call this)- can't find name/pseudonym or picture of you anywhere on site. People connect with other people and want to see a face behind a site. If you're a business, people do business with people, so show you're human.Image Quality: in header or anywhere for that matter (stretched, pixelated, etc)(headline needs to draw people to blog post, need to consider visually impaired as well)For 3, can also say that if your design should match your tone. If you write with lots of dark humor, maybe sunny yellow isn’t the right color choice. If you’re writing is flowy and calming, then bright colors don’t work.
- Hard to read, non web friendly fonts - Too small of text in main column or for headline10- this can also include things other than badges so I went with “stuff”
- Making design changes yourself is possible. At the very minimum, you should know what the serach engines see and how to “look” at your blog in terms of basic code for fonts, layout and colors.
- Use View Source to Check Your TitleYou can also check out other people’s sites to look at what plugins they are using and what theme, if any. You can find out lots of great information.
- Making design changes yourself is possible.
- Keep It Simple StupidOnce you know what you want to show, really think about what your blog is about. All interested parties want to know.Sure, you can have a lifestyle blog, but you really should not have dozens of categories. Narrow down your niche just a bit so that you can show readers the topics you blog about without a gigantic pull down menu.Both the reader and the spiders know what Ree is talking about. Simple categories (still with a wide focus) and a focused design make it easy for search engines to lead People to the Pioneer Woman and easy for readers to find what they want once they are there.This is from SEObrowser.com
- What is really important to you? Too much can overwhelm a reader and make for a lot of outbound links from every page of your site. This makes it hard for a reader to focus and hard for the spiders too.
- Think in pixels for a moment.You have limited space to show everything. Editing is a must to avoid clutter and planning is KEY. Eliminate waste and diagram where your elements will go before you start picking colors and fonts.This is one of many design layouts (we will talk about layout in detail) but it is common.As far as planning:Your header should be able to fit in a standard browser window. Limit width to 1000 px or less. Also, do not let your header take up the entire “above the fold” area of your blog. You need a lot of important information where people can see it the minute they land on your blog.Your content area should be wider than the width of your sidebar(s). Content is king and having 2 giant sidebars and one long narrow content area puts the focus on the wrong thing.Consider using a “fat” footer to hold information you want (or need) to show that does not need to be above the fold.Use your navigation and sidebar to convey MUST have information, guide readers to your awesome content and of course, include any contractual paid ads you have.Think about your content and how you want to display it. Just teasers? One full post with teasers? Multiple full posts? Each will make a difference for how much room you have verically on your sidebar. Ie if you have a compact content design your sidebar may run past your content. That looks icky. This is also true for single post pages so if you are using a footer make sure that a reader does not have to scroll down past where your content ends. They won’t see your footer at all.
- Keep your header small and make it serve double duty.Use your footer. There are things you want to show or repeat but they don’t need space on the main page. For Crissy she has her winners and disclosure and PR stuff at the bottom and the categories she wants her readers to see at the top. She leaves MAXIMUM space for content.Place MAIN categories creatively in the sidebar to show readers our best stuff or themed material. Like Rookie Moms. The red pops and it is at the very top of the sidebar.
- Intro to navigation—Examples- make it easy to do business withstarbucks app– don’t even have to get payment out, just use phoneZappos- free shipping both ways, 365 day returnsEasy=loyalty
- These two things are the super invisible force behind your blog’s greatness. Before your eyes glaze over, how many times have you left someone’s blog without leaving a comment because the word verification was too hard? Or tweeting someone’s incredible post because there was no Retweet button?You left that blog because they made something too hard on you. This section shows you how to give your readers an easy button.
- Think about website like a store and your blog posts are the products
- End caps and things at the front of the store give you suggestions of things that are hot right now.Related posts: PB&J together. Or batteries in the toy section. They are suggesting products.Category- drop down, list,-- what if there were 100 things listed on the directional signage at the grocery store?Search box- asking a store associatePopular series or categories– make into buttons on side and/or add into navigationDo you need archives?
- Examples of pulling out popular categories in a visual wayMommyshortsShesuggestsUntrained housewife
- Featuredpages—Things I can’t sayMusingsofahousewifeThe prairie homestead
- Formatting- give you natural pauses and a place for readers to rest.
- Comment Button- top- social proof, bottom- people click most often AFTER they read a postModeration- compelling reason to modify– there are other ways to combat spam. Moderation implies trust. On WP, plugins- WP Ban, Akismet, GrowmapWord Verification- annoys most people, ESPECIALLY if you’re trying to get people to enter a giveaway. CREATES FRICTION between you and the readersBlogger: can’t email back but non-Blogger people have to jump through hoops
- Test them outCustomize
- In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.
- Lead from previous slide into this about not giving readers too many choices.Categories– shouldn’t have too many categories– also an SEO benefitCTA- at the end of a post, stay away from asking too much: “if you like this post, consider subscribing to my feed, fan me on fb and follow me”– stick with oneSharing buttons– having a way to share posts is a MUST
- In any (good) painting, there is going to be a fairly obvious point of entry. Artists do this by establishing a hierarchy (an arrangement of things based on importance). With a clear hierarchy, the artist almost literally tells you what to look at in their piece.----------(Suffice to say, if you wanted to put a logo anywhere on this painting, you would put it on the yellow wall above the coffee makers.)So web design is pretty much the same -- by making some things on your website look more important than others (through size, color, or isolation), you are directing your readers to look at the things you want them to see. With one main difference: most people already spend a lot of time looking at websites and don’t need a lot of instruction on where to look first. So…
- In Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the obvious point of entry is on the bright, right side. Then you move to the server, whose gaze leads you to the woman. Next to her, the man is getting darker, and the man on the far left is darker still. At which point you head outside to the dark, uninviting alley and make a quick u-turn back to the warm light where you can rest.SWITCH BACK TO PREVIOUS SLIDE
- … in addition to leading them around the page, you also need to know where they will probably be looking first.These are eye-tracking heat maps for 6 completely different, unrelated, websites show us that pretty much everyone starts in the upper left corner of a website and moves right and down from there. Which is pretty logical considering the way we, in America, read. So where would you put your most important information? …
- … In the upper left, of course. Followed closely by the upper right/middle and/or lower left.Then your content.Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, whatever is most important to you should go as close to the upper left corner
- Swiss Miss’s blog almost literally forms an arrow pointing you to the top left corner. Look:
- Right?
- At Kirtsy we use size to tell you what is most important. In this case, the largest image on the page is what we want you to focus on. Once you’ve done that, sure, go ahead and look at the other awesome stuff. But DON’T MISS THE BIG ONE!
- The standard. Header followed by content and then right sidebar (s).
- Pretty, right? There’s really no other word that comes to mind. Except maybe botanical. The light mossy green with the white title. A playful, serif font with a sweet curve on the h, and the addition of the flourishes with the plants coming out of the top. A lovely logo for a lovely site.All very light and delicate. Beautiful.
- Now let’s talk a little bit about ways to dictate hierarchy:At Design Crush, Kelly uses color (or, actually, brightness) to almost force you to look primarily at 3 things on her site. Squint your eyes here -- with all her tonal page structure (background, top-level navigation, social links, and even her headlines), the things that stand out are her logo, her photos and her ads. And what else would she want you to look at, really? Pretty smart.
- And what would a design discussion be without a quick glance at the great SF Girl By Bay! She is self described as Bohemian Modern Style and that is exactly what her fonts convey. The logo font is bohemian in its handwriting scratchiness, but the sans serif headline font is clean and modern. (next) This site is also a great study in consistency: the flowers along the top of the page are repeated in her sidebar. The pale pink dot net to her post titles are repeated in her social media links. And the zigzag stitching in the sidebar tastefully continues the logo’s floating-in-the-wind banner.
- First the top, then the left sidebar, then the main content, then the right sidebar.Are there SEO consequences to this?
- Home page with link to the blog and other projects.
- Home page with link to the blog and other projects.
- Whitespace doesn’t have to be white, per se. It simply means that you have given your content plenty of air to breathe. Don’t be afraid of it – it makes your site happy. And your readers too -- by minimizing distractions, it’s easier for them to find what they’re looking for.Coco Chanel’s famous quote applies here: “Before you go out, take something off.” I would say “Before you launch your site, take something away.” A link to a site you don’t really visit anymore. A badge saying you attended a conference 2 years ago. A link to your flickr account that you never use. Something.And while you’re hard at work airing things out, be sure to pay attention to consistency. Your readers are depending on you to establish rules for them to follow. Headlines in a certain font and color, links in another. If you use a rounded rectangle for one thing, use rounded rectangles for everything. Etc. etc. You get the idea.
- Here are two basic rules:The fonts you use communicate things about your site before your readers ever read a single word. The mood of your site, and your style being paramount.Don’t use more than a few fonts on your site. 2 or maybe 3 MAX.
- Different fonts convey different feelings. Here’s a sample of 10 fonts and the basic mood they communicate.
- So what I’ve done here is I’ve taken the name of our favorite gone-but-not-forgotten magazine. (And btw it’s not actually gone – there’s a “new” issue coming out in April if you haven’t heard!) I wrote the name in each of the fonts I discussed on the previous slide. Do you see how each one conveys a totally different style?A great website for fonts is Dafont.com. The reason I like this one so much is because it’s very clean and easy to navigate, and because it breaks down its font lists into descriptive categories, not technical categories. So, instead of seeing categories like “Slab-Serifs, Moderns, and Humanists” you will, instead, find categories like “Groovy, Medieval, and Graffiti.”So does everyone understand what I’m talking about when I talk about fonts conveying a mood? I hope so. If you don’t, please ask a question at the end. Let’s move on to some websites.
- The font Karen chose to use for the title and headlines on Chookooloonks -- a wide, but light slab serif – show her to be graceful yet bold. And definitely definitely different :)(next) And again – just two other fonts – three fonts total. A narrow sans serif for the blog post titles, and a clean one for all the body text.
- She uses what seems like more fonts only because she uses different styles of the same font, but in fact there are still only 3 fonts here – the navigation is one font, all caps; the headlines are another font, lowercase; the body font is the same as the headlines; and the sidebar headlines are lowercase italics of the same font.All very light and delicate. Beautiful.
- And what would a design discussion be without a quick glance at the great SF Girl By Bay! She is self described as Bohemian Modern Style and that is exactly what her fonts convey. The logo font is bohemian in its handwriting scratchiness, but the sans serif headline font is clean and modern. (next) This site is also a great study in consistency: the flowers along the top of the page are repeated in her sidebar. The pale pink dot net to her post titles are repeated in her social media links. And the zigzag stitching in the sidebar tastefully continues the logo’s floating-in-the-wind banner.
- There are 3 basic rules to remember here:Just like with fonts, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers with color. My advice is to choose 3-5 colors for your site max. Unless your theme is rainbows, in which case I’ll grant you permission to use 7 colors, but you still really don’t need that many to convey rainbow.On a website, colors aren’t just there to look pretty. They have big jobs. Assign roles to your colors: links, headers, post titles, etc. And keep it consistent. Whatever is important should have a signature color and never stray from that.Color inspiration is everywhere. Don’t limit yourself to what you find online – look around you wherever you are – color palettes surround you. Someone’s great outfit; a bright happy kitchen; your back deck covered with fallen leaves; your child making a snow angel. Take pictures and use them to inspire your design.
- As I said, you don’t really need all the colors in the rainbow to convey a rainbow. At Design Mom, Gabby does this with just 5 colors. And these colors are used for not much more than her logo and her social media links. But to great effect! Most of Gabby’s site is white and grey, so the rainbow in her logo really stands out brightly.Additionally, she repeats this same rainbow for her social media links, right below her bio. These are basically periods – they stop you in your tracks and make sure you read the welcome message. The dots and the crayons almost serve as brackets for the information Gabby WANTS you to read.
- As I said, you don’t really need all the colors in the rainbow to convey a rainbow. At Design Mom, Gabby does this with just 5 colors. And these colors are used for not much more than her logo and her social media links. But to great effect! Most of Gabby’s site is white and grey, so the rainbow in her logo really stands out brightly.Additionally, she repeats this same rainbow for her social media links, right below her bio. These are basically periods – they stop you in your tracks and make sure you read the welcome message. The dots and the crayons almost serve as brackets for the information Gabby WANTS you to read. The only other place Gabby includes color is in the rollover color for her links – they pick up the blue. Very subtle, and so clean.
- At You’re Welcome, the bright orange serves as a great counterpoint to the soothing blue-grey-green palette. And the bold outlines of black give the blue some punch.(next ) But the orange is the playah here, reappearing as the post header font and the sidebar header font.Speaking of fonts, doesn’t the magic marker feel of this font tell you so much about this site’s attitude? Coupled with the sub-title, you know these people like to have fun.
- At You’re Welcome, the bright orange serves as a great counterpoint to the soothing blue-grey-green palette. And the bold outlines of black give the blue some punch.But the orange is the playah here, reappearing as the post header font and the sidebar header font.Speaking of fonts, doesn’t the magic marker feel of this font tell you so much about this site’s attitude? Coupled with the sub-title, you know these people like to have fun.
- Let’s look at Oh Happy Day again. A great example of the colors speaking for the site – bright yellow and blue do a great job of being happy, don’t they.And she uses her yellow effectively – as the date over each post (the circles follow the confetti theme on the site too – nice) and the search box. Otherwise, she goes with basic black and white. So clean and bright and crisp.
- Let’s look at Oh Happy Day again. A great example of the colors speaking for the site – bright yellow and blue do a great job of being happy, don’t they.And she uses her yellow effectively – as the date over each post (the circles follow the confetti theme on the site too – nice) and the search box. Otherwise, she goes with basic black and white. So clean and bright and crisp.
- Design Sponge shows us not only how to use color, but also where to get inspired. She uses a photo of some sweet ribbon as her page header. Then repeats the element AND the color of the ribbon throughout the site to move us around the page.The photographic element of the ribbon also makes the site look like it’s all a real, physical thing – a piece of slate with Design*Sponge painted on, and all the other stuff is laying on top. It’s really lovely.See how she pulls different colors of ribbon out for different elements on her site?
- Design Sponge shows us not only how to use color, but also where to get inspired. She uses a photo of some sweet ribbon as her page header. Then repeats the element AND the color of the ribbon throughout the site to move us around the page.The photographic element of the ribbon also makes the site look like it’s all a real, physical thing – a piece of slate with Design*Sponge painted on, and all the other stuff is laying on top. It’s really lovely.See how she pulls different colors of ribbon out for different elements on her site? One ribbon for post headers; another ribbon for thin sidebar items; another one for the right sidebar – with ricrac!
- So where do you turn for inspiration? How about your lunch?
- Or maybe a building you pass on your way to work each morning?
- Or how about your kid at the park!
- As for why to use a pre-designed theme, here are some arguments:
- This is a food website called Epikur. It’s really nice, right? Lots of contrast, nice colors, shows off their photos. But check this out:
- It’s a THEME! This is a screen shot of the theme right from the theme website. Look how little they changed: the logo! And that’s pretty much it. Yet they have a great looking site!
- Last but not least, barCHOCOLOATE. A lush and luscious site for someone’s chocolate-making business. So perfect, right? But look!Here’s the theme! Very different feeling, but still – the chocolate man had very little work to do here.
- And this theme even has a built-in gallery so he didn’t need to create that functionality – he just needed to start uploading pictures.So if you aren’t a code genius (which you probably aren’t if you’re taking this class – I’m not, that’s for sure) choosing a pre-made theme is a great way to go. It handles layout for you, pretty much. Then you need only choose fonts and colors and get to work. Here are some great sources for good looking themes:
- Genesis Blissful Theme
- Looks at all the changes you can make. You don’t have to includeeberything and you can change up your colors and fonts to be just the way you want while maintaining a professionally designed structure to your site.
- When LauraMayes came to me asking for a site redesign, she knew one thing: that she wanted these colors: Yep. This is a Pinterest Board she made of food and kitchens. And this is the site she got:
- Like candy, right?
- Another client of ours, Catherine Horgan, loves layers. She loves to layer clothes, and she loves to create layered inspiration boards. And that’s what we talked about in our design discovery meeting. So this is the site she got:
- Another client of ours, Catherine Horgan, loves layers. She loves to layer clothes, and she loves to create layered inspiration boards. And that’s what we talked about in our design discovery meeting. So this is the site she got:Lots of layers, but without all the crazy, hard to figure out what’s going on ness that layers can sometimes bring And we support all the sites we create. If you’re having a problem, you do not need to stay up all night trying to figure it out – WE’LL stay up all night trying to figure it out
- Frameworks built for DIY people. Skins are available but you can do it yourself.SEO is built in and support is available for almost any question.
- Frameworks built for DIY people. Skins are available but you can do it yourself.SEO is built in and support is available for almost any question.
- Frameworks built for DIY people. Skins are available but you can do it yourself.SEO is built in and support is available for almost any question.