8 steps for making a great web design

It's not always easy to make a great web design, especially for yourself. I found it much easier making a web design for others, than for my own web projects or blogs. (thats why this blog has this simple design so far, untill I come up with something perfect for it...

Anyway, there are some steps which can help to make the process of designing much easier and more succesfull.

Lets get started.


1. Content - maybe surprising for some of you, but the most important thing for succesfull web design is to figure out what you want to put on your page, what parts of the content you want to emphasize etc. I noticed a lot of designs which looked really, really nice but when I tried to browse thru it and find some information, it was totally useless...

Thats ok if you are an artist or graphic designer and wants to emphasize your creativity, but if you want to offer some content to your readers, then make a list of the content you want to show... For example: menu, text, links, banners, ads, photos...


2. Positioning - when you made a list of everything you want to show on your homepage and other pages, you need to position them in order to emphasize things that you want to be spotted first and thing that are not so important.

If text is the most important, put it in a center - let it be the first thing that a person can see when he/she comes to the site.


3. Navigation - it is proven that a person stays on one page from cca 5-30 sec. In that time, an individual scans thru the page in order to find things that interests him. Therefore, you have to make sure that your page is easily scanable and that it has good navigation menus for quick browsing.

This will prolong the time that the person will spend on your page, possibility that he find something interesting and come back again.


4. Colors - when you have previous steps taken care of, try to imagine what kind of feeling do you want people to feel when they come to your web. For something serious and dramatic pick red, black, gray and white combination. Find out what each color means and use it according to the theme of your web project.
The thing that works the best for me is to find web designs which are similar to what I want to achieve as well as a bunch of photos which I would like to use.
Then I make a collage out of all them, and the colors which pop up the most, are the one I use in finall design.


5. Photos - its always nice to include a great photo in design. It can really emphasize the whole web page, just be carefull what you choose... Let it be a visual description of the page.


6. Design - when you have decided about content, positioning and colors you are ready to start designing the "big picture" around it. At this point its much easier and the final result will be much more satisfying. You can design it on a piece of paper and then edit it in any drawing editor that you usually use. To keep in touch with the "latest trends" in web design, surf around css galleries and find the inspiration... Remember, its all about details. If your page is mostly about content, you don't have to make a wow design, but pay more attention on the details which will emphasize the content...


7. Coding - now that you have put it all in, its time for coding. For me, the best way to do it is to make a skelet of the layers, then put it in html form, and then in css. I'm working in firefox first, and when it looks ok there, I go and fix it in other browsers.


8. Validating - sugar comes at the end... :D
When we are all done designing, its time to validate. Although the only people that will check out is your page validated are other designers, its good for You to do this. You will check the mistakes, fix it, and will be able to say that you really did it correctly...