Achieving Good Design

I might not be the world’s most smartest person when it comes to design, but I do pride myself in knowing a bit. Enough to design a few websites and not have it look like the average MySpace profile. No offense, MySpace people. Honestly.

But the truth here is that you can find a lot of bad design everywhere. For this reason it’s really easy to pick out the people who didn’t put a lot of time in their site, or either just don’t know how to do it.

This is quite obvious when you visit a free website hoster like Geocities of Freewebs. They’re both great companies / services, honestly. I hosted one of my first websites with Freewebs, and I did Microsoft Frontpage experimentation with Geocities.

But sometimes, you need more than Frontpage.

Obviously, those who don’t have professional applications like Adobe Photoshop will be at a disadvantage. Designing good graphics is hard when you use Microsoft Paint. Believe me.

Of course, other people don’t want to improve at all. For those people, I can’t help. People who just love the way blink works, well, if you really insist on it, I can’t help you.

However, I just wanted to offer a few important things to keep in mind when you design something.

1. Colors: If you pick blue text with a green background and flashing red headers, I, for one, will be turned down from your site immediately. Pick colors that go with each other. If you have a hard time deciding, try Colourlovers or monochrome, if that’s your taste.
2. White Space: White space is the art of leaving space. It doesn’t have to be white, but what it does have to do is give the feeling of space. Imagine going into a room crammed with everything. While you might like the stuff in the room once you sift through it, your first thought is probably going to be “ew, that room’s messy”. Same with web design.
3. Typography: Try to pick a good, readable font. Serif or san-serif fonts are nice. Curlz MT is not. While a lot of people probably have that font installed on their computer, a lot of others don’t. That’s why you should try CSS and prioritizing fonts (more on this later).
4. Clean Code: You might have the best design in the world, but if you have messy code, then I’ll just acknowledge the designer as a bad coder. You have to be good on the inside and outside.
5. Consistancy: This isn’t hard to explain. Just keep your color schemes, page layouts, and whatever consistant across your website. Blue to red to green isn’t exactly being nice to my eyes.

I’m no design professional (I’m just eleven years old as of writing), and this isn’t professional design advice. But just keep this in mind when you design your next site. Or maybe upgrade your current one. It might help.