Layout, What's It All About?

What elements make a great site? Better yet, what websites keep you coming back again and again? Your favorite sites probably have these things in common:

• A Consistent Look
• An Easily Understandable Navigation
• A Good Balance Between images and content
• A Complimentary color scheme & simple backgrounds

Better by Design will help both the beginning and intermediate developers with these layout dilemmas. Each building block we present you in our Layout section will help you create a site visitors will want to come back to again and again.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. This is the key foundation to your website. Why build a site no one can make their way through? This is like making a mansion with doors leading nowhere. Who would visit?

Keep it simple. One of the best ways to learn good, simple design is find examples of it and surround your self with it; use them as your models; analyze why it is so good. As the little saying goes "What goes in must come out." Make it so. When designing a web site, determine what the purpose of that site is. For most simplicity is key. For some however it is more important to show off graphics or for whatever reason set a mood other than simple. For the most part it is important to keep the layout on a web page simple. It helps the layout to look clean and for readability to be at a maximum. This is aided by a lot of background space around the elements. This helps distingue image from text. Graphics are also important to keep simple. Having minimal graphics to help keep the load time on the page down. It is suggested that an entire page should be no larger than 30K. This will keep people coming back to your site.

Navigation. One of the most important parts to having a user friendly web page is the application of your navigation. Your web pages navigation is essential to your clients. If your clients cannot figure out how to link through sections of your page, or if your page is difficult to navigate through, then they probably won't come back. Now this doesn't mean hot-links everywhere with no graphics, because this to will separate you from your clients. One must find a median between the two. Remember, if your webpage is not aesthetically pleasing no one will want to come back. To make a webpage that is pleasant to visit, you would try to get a consistent look and feel throughout it. This includes your navigation.

Most people either have there main navigation on top of their page, the sides, or all three. There are no rules from which to place your navigation, just as long as it looks consistent and is easily usable to the users from the moment of entry to your page. Navigation can be anything that has to do with linking your pages. You can use words, symbols, graphics, or a conglomerate of the three. One thing that navigation must do is link the information you want to link.

There are many ways to link your navigation. When linking more than one piece of information to a singular graphic, image mapping is the thing to do. You can throw JavaScript rollovers into your graphics to create a high user activity feel or you can link single images to certain parts of your page. It is up to you how you want your navigation to work, just as long as it is consistent with the rest of your page and the message you want to place.