Building a website is like the biblical book of Genesis, it is an act of creation that makes something out of nothing, using only imagination and coding skills expressed on a computer keyboard. Despite the number of social media apps and other means to make a company or product known, the website remains an important platform to establish an online presence.
However, having a website is simply no longer enough. Today, there are 1.74 billion websites on the internet, all competing for attention, views, and clicks. It is important for a website to be unique and noticeable, and the key to that is design and customization.
Websites Need to Be Well-planned and Custom-designed
In the detailed planning and design of collaborative robots, manufacturers of these machines make sure that the functions, performance, and safety measures meet the demands and needs of clients. There is no one-size-fits-all robot since each model is built for a particular purpose and company. These automated machines also complement and add value to the work of human workers.
In the same way, a well-planned and custom-designed website must complement the vision, goals, and objectives of a brand, company, or product that it represents. It is uniquely designed to reflect the character of a company, product, or service that it represents. A website duplicates and adds to the value of an individual or team of professionals who performs a variety of tasks such as providing information, interacting with customers, selling products online, or providing assistance to clients.
Fundamentals of CSS Website Design
Given the importance of high quality, meticulously designed, functional websites, it is important to know some fundamental principles of design. These principles are universal and would apply to any style, theme, or content for a website. Follow these proven tenets in CSS website development and reap the benefits of a truly effective design for boosting online presence and customer experience on your pages:
- Color – Color is an essential ingredient to the overall site design. Aside from the text and graphics, the colors are what adds “life” and personality to the website. The colors help attract the visitor’s attention, influence their interest and mood, and even prompt them to take action. In fact, as a science, color psychology is used in various types of marketing, sales, and advertising in both online and offline platforms. For example, the color red is often associated with confidence, power, and action and that is why some sports cars are popularly painted in that color. Blue is associated with stability or safety, that is why many police officers’ uniforms are often in that color. Yellow, on the other hand, evokes a happy feeling. A web designed needs to experiment with hues and palettes to get the right color combinations for the brand image they want to project on the site.
- Typography – Font style, size, and placement is very important. A website must be readable and convenient for a user. In fact, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs knew the importance of typeface that he even took college courses on how to design them. Jobs actually fell in love with the art of calligraphy and wanted his Apple computers to have the best font types in the industry. At a technical level, combining too many font styles will add to code weight. The ideal, however, is to keep typography styles to a minimum, reduce code weight, and make the overall look of the website consistent. Heirarchy is another component in typography that needs to be mastered since it is a way to better organize headings, sub-headings, and the body text of content. In terms of size, the general recommendation is to keep font size between 16 pixels and 18 pixels, that is, from 1em to 1.25em in size.
- Space – Spacing of text is all about the user’s flow of reading when they are on the website. Do the words have too much space in between them that the reader or person browsing the site experience lags that interrupt his or her train of thought? Or perhaps the text is too tight, making it uncomfortable to read? The layout of text is also vital to the overall design since, unlike a book, the placement of words and paragraphs on a webpage is not always linear from left to right. The proximity of individual fonts or letters and among words also describe relationships between them. It is important to be aware of how individual fonts, words, and paragraphs are laid out based on their importance, contextual relationship, and purpose.
Creating a website, therefore, is more like a combination of art and science. The design elements invoke principles of aesthetics while science is applied in terms of coding and using the right colors, layouts, sizing, and graphics on each page. When properly done, a website serves the needs of a user while advancing the business goals of the company that had it designed and put on live on the internet. Indeed, a website is more than just a collection of code, it is the expression of a business vision brought to life on screen.