Professional Web Design

Web Site Creative — Elements of Style
Your web site is often your first contact with customers, so it’s important that the creative elements you use reflect your business goals and objectives — and even your personality. Choosing the right colors, fonts, and graphics for your web site will help you establish your company’s online presence and attract more visitors.

If you’re new to web design, it may be tempting to go overboard, using all of the colors, fonts, and graphics at your disposal. If that happens, you’ll end up with a busy site that’s hard to read, confusing to navigate, slow to load, or just plain unattractive. Knowing some basic design rules can help you create a great site.
 

Getting Started
First, look closely at the sites you frequent, such as news, weather, or shopping pages. Do you notice a pattern in what you find visually appealing? Why do you return to those sites? Jot down which colors, fonts, or text treatments always seem to catch your eye. Now go to your competitors’ sites. Do some look more reliable or established than others?

Using a Template
To keep your site attractive but simple, it may be helpful to begin with a template. There are many templates available on our ECSnap here. These templates are often professionally designed and customizable for your business.

While most of the work is done for you when you use a template, you’ll still have the opportunity to customize your site and make some key creative decisions.

Color
Typically, it’s best to stick with three colors and to choose a neutral, solid background color like white. Two of the most popular color combinations are red, yellow, and white and blue, orange, and white. You can adjust the shades and depths of your colors to make some sections of the site stand out more than others.
Using more than three colors can make your site look less cohesive — especially when you factor in all of the colors in the images you’ll be incorporating.

Fonts
The fonts on your site can influence your readers’ perception of your company. For example, a serif font like Times New Roman is more formal than the sans serif font Arial. Select fonts that are easy to read (sans serif fonts tend to be easier to read online) and are readable on any browser (Explorer, Netscape, etc.) or operating system (PC or Mac).

Choose one font for longer blocks of text and a complimentary font for headings and menu items. You also can use the same font but differentiate it by making it bold or increasing or decreasing its size.

Graphics
Resist the temptation to use lots of pictures and graphics because it can make your site slow to load and drive away impatient users. And designers agree that one strong image on your home page often is far more powerful than multiple smaller ones. Optimize graphics by cropping white space and making all images as small as possible without sacrificing quality — the optimal resolution for web graphics is 72 dots per-inch (DPI).

If you have a digital camera, you can take and upload photos but, if you’d rather display professional images, there are a number of free and paid sites where you can search for photos to use on your site.

Good Creative Pays Off
Once you have established a color palette and selected your fonts and graphics, see if they work well together to convey your company’s image. Try a variety of font-color-graphic combinations, and have fun designing your site.

Remember, when it comes to design, subtle often is best. Choosing the right creative elements — colors, fonts, and images — allows you to be creative while building a professional-looking site that will enhance your online presence, appeal to customers, and help you meet your business objectives.
 

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