Good Web Design Principle #3: An Attractive Appearance

This is the original blind date fear — What’s this person going to look like? They might sound good on the phone but it’s a different story, if in person, looked like they just crawled out of a vacuum cleaner!

First impressions count for a lot, and a website that looks unprofessional is a tough headache to overcome. It reflects poorly on your entire organization.

By contrast, coordinating the important web design puzzle pieces like Site Copy (or text), Graphics, Navigation, and Organization, you can create an appearance that is both attractive and memorable.

Great example: www.gmtiinfo.com

• Be careful to balance all your site ingredients.Too much of any one thing can be bad, plus overuse of graphics, bells and whistles can cause your site to load slowly if they aren’t optimized and coded appropriately.
• Make sure your site loads quickly. A good rule of thumb to follow is that you have 3 seconds or less to get a visitor’s attention. If the site takes too long to load, they’ll move on and miss your message.
• Stick with what works rather than reinventing the wheel. Major companies do research all the time on how people read web pages, how they go through the checkout process, how they use site navigation, and so on. You can benefit from this research without having to repeat it yourself. Preview what works for the major players like amazon.com, Google, Yahoo and others. One example of this simple principle is that people expect the main site navigation – or links to the other major sections of the site – to be located on the left side vertically, or across the top horizontally. Stick with one of these two approaches to site navigation, and visitors will find it easier to interact with your site.
• Keep colors to 2-3 complimentary choices. Too many colors look tacky, and too few look unprofessional. Choose an appealing color palette and use shades of it to create the appearance of more colors and to keep colors from clashing.
• Choose fonts carefully. There is only a limited range of fonts that will display online (in text) anyway, so stick with the basic fonts that work like Ariel, Verdana, Courier, Times New Roman, Geneva and Georgia.
• Plan for growth and avoid complexity. If your homepage is over designed, you won’t have any place to put important updates – and you should update your homepage regularly if you want people coming back. So, don’t get boxed in to restrictive designs, nor develop endless sub-page designs.
• Begin with a clean, professional design for your home page and develop 3-4 sub-page variations that flow from the home page design. A relatively small amount of investment in this area can give you an enormous lift in appearance and professionalism.
• Stay relevant. Make sure your text and images work together to tell your story succinctly and provide relevance to your reader. Have a reason for all images, and make sure they communicate your message whether they are looked at with or without the text. Same with the text – make sure it tells the same story as the images. Don’t use irrelevant images nor write irrelevant copy. You need both to be in harmony with one another to convey your most central messages.

Developing an attractive appearance overcomes the “Not much to look at” criticism in web design.