The document provides five tips for web design in 2012: (1) make a good first impression with your design by enticing users to stay on your site; (2) keep designs simple with minimal colors, graphics, and whitespace; (3) maintain consistency across websites, emails, and social media with common colors, fonts, and design; (4) clearly direct users where to go and what to do with clean images and calls to action; (5) continually test and refine your design using different browsers and operating systems to improve based on customer reactions.

1. Five Essential Web Design Tips For 2012
Today I’m going to be offering some brief web design tips to help improve and
build upon your success as a web designer. These are ideas that I hope you can
keep with you somewhere and draw up their ideas the next time you have a web
design project.
First impressions count for a lot:
First impressions definitely count one thing to bear in mind is that there are
obviously millions upon millions of different websites on the Internet, so
remember that when someone visits your website is not really going to be
anything special to them unless you make it special. So you want them to have a
positive reaction immediately after landing on your new website. Remember;
their back button is just a click away, so you need to try and entice them to stay
best you can; so just make sure you’re giving the best impression you possibly
can with your web design. So how do you achieve that?
Keep your web design simple:
You keep you web design simple. Sometimes I think it’s all too easy to be caught
up in the design aspects of it, different colours here, different graphics there. But
remember; if you want to make a good first impression then you need to keep it
simple. Never be afraid to edit and likewise don’t be afraid of whitespace.
Consistency is key:
Your website is obviously the basis for your companies’ brand, so what you
should be doing is making sure that your e-mails and your social media sites are
all consistent and all convey the same message or theme. The best way to achieve
this is by using the same colours, the same fonts, and keeping the web design as
consistent as possible throughout.
Don’t make users think for themselves:
I mean this with the utmost respect your users! This really ties in with the second
step of keeping it simple. The key is that you must always direct your visitors
exactly where you want them to go and what to do when they get there. You
should do this by using clean images, clean calls to actions and really make sure
that you’re driving your customers where you want them to go and leave them
onto what you want them to do.
Test, refine, test:
Finally; you should make sure that you always testing, always tweaking and
always testing some more. I find virtual machines were very good way to test out
new web designs in the web browsers which matter and on different operating

2. systems. The really try this time, you can never test enough. You may also think
that you have one of the best websites in the world, but until you know how
customers react to it you’re never going to know how effective it is.
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