I’ve been working on a new site design for The Journeymen Podcast over the past few weeks, and I decided to have my friend Eric take a look at the basic shell after a couple days. There were a few things that he picked apart that made me realize that I was out of touch with current design trends and good practices. As I started looking through a couple well designed sites that he recommended, I noticed some of the things he was talking about. I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good design for journeymenpodcast.com, and now I want to go through this site and give it a major overhaul.
Here are some of the things I came away with from taking a look at high profile sites and my conversation with Eric:
Simplicity
- While a picture tells a thousand words, no one wants to read an epic novel online. Don’t overdo it.
- If you are doing your own graphical work, be sure to keep those graphics simple as well. With multiple layers of complexity, websites can become confusing and people are less likely to keep coming back to your site.
Consistency
- If you used all caps for your navigation, keep all caps for headings on your side bar and throughout your site.
- The colors of your logo should be complemented by the colors of your site. If you think clashing colors help parts of your site stick out better, think again. Clashing colors just make a site hard on the eyes.
Helvetica
- It’s everywhere, and there’s a reason for that.
- While it’s not necessary to use Helvetica, it is imperative to choose a font that is not straining.
- Choose a font that fits the personality of your site.
Navigation
- There are two ways to approach navigation.
- Link to everything all at once.
- While I don’t particularly like this method, it does have its place.
- If there is not a lot of different content or a thousand different links, this method can be annoying.
- Keep it simple.
- While this is my preferred method, it can be difficult to find the right balance.
- If you have a lot of content, the general links have to be descriptive enough for people to find what they are looking for, but not so descriptive that you are linking to everything.
- If you don’t have a lot of content, you don’t want to link to everything, but you also don’t want your site to look empty.
Foundation
- A well designed and fast website starts with a well coded and preferably SEO optimized foundation.
- If you’re like me, you enjoy designing how a website looks but the rest of the coding is more than you want to deal with.
- I’d recommend anyone to try the Standard Theme with WordPress. It’s an awesome foundation to build on and even looks great out of the box.
If generally stick to these rules, your site design will be at least decent. Don’t be surprised if you see tlamarca.com change over the next couple weeks.