"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Just one look at today's webpages tells you that different styles abound on the World Wide Web. There are, however, some basic do's and dont's when it comes to making your site attractive.- Color: Color affects mood and emotions. Blues and yellows seem summery, blacks and whites seem elegant, and grays seem conservative. Use your colors wisely in your design. For example, you wouldn't use grays and browns if you are designing a site for a daycare center but might for a bank.
- You should also be familiar with the basic color wheel and Color Theory. Try to find colors that complement each other. Once you have found a color set, stick with it. This provides consistency and an identity to your site. In addition, you want to make sure that text colors be contrasting to background colors. Remember that everyone's monitor and operating system treats colors differently so seek maximum contrast as protection.
- Because operating systems and monitors are different, try to use colors from the Web-Safe Palette. After clicking Enter, click on "216 + Hex Color Chart". These are colors that appear relatively similar on most computers.
- Graphics: Images are a great part of a webpage. Even though the Internet was not originally intended to send graphics, they are an important part of todays world wide web. The ability to see a picture of someone or a map of an area is very valuable. However, value is the issue. Don't put up a graphic just for the sake of it. In the mid 1990's too many web designers loaded their pages with excessive graphics. It was new and cool. Today, good web designers limit the use of slow loading graphics and choose images that add functionality to the page.
- Try to adjust the size within Photoshope(physical size, file size should always be as small as possible) so the proportion of the image to the rest of the page is appropriate. Is the image the main focus of the page? If it is, make it stand out. If it wraps within a section of text, make sure that it is physically smaller than the text. Try to position images on a page so that they balance the page. Because images are so important to a successful webpage, we will spend quite a bit of time this trimester learning how to make "lean, mean graphics".
- Layout: Layout of your webpage is important both for aesthetics and functionality. Aesthetically, your page layout should have a visual balance. Give visual prominance to the most important part of that page or subpage. Try to analyze all of the sections of the page, ranking them in order of importance: most important, 2nd most important, etc. Give each layer of importance less visual prominance than the previous one. Note: It is very important that your title page(index page/table of contents) fit on one monitor screen without scrolling. This gives your visitor a visual site map of your website.
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