The Well Designed Webpage

Balance, organization and focus

The well designed webpage has balance, organization and focus. If all the pages of your website follow that type of pattern they will have that clean, uniform appearance that most web designers shoot for. Cluttered and unorganized content turns people off . Don’t underestimate the power of your webpage layout it can make or break a website.

Optically clean and user friendly graphic design and text are essential to the credibility of a website. A well thought out approach to webpage design will provide easy navigation, user friendly access, and present its content clearly for the visitor to digest. Balance is essential to this.

Balance

Balancing the content of your webpages is more that just producing an attractive layout. Providing a means for your visitors to easily scan your webpages is far more important. People coming to your website are looking for some specific information and/or product details and the sooner they find it the better your website’s performance will be.

Producing a well balanced webpage layout entails presenting your visitor with a pleasant visual experience. Most top performing websites demonstrate this effect by clean and well focused layouts. The minute your eye perceives this type of webpage there is a sense of order and balance. The eye will grasp this type of layout as a pleasant pattern, uncluttered and organized.

Organization

The well designed webpage makes good use of white space to lead the eye around the content. It also emphasizes the main features of the page with a logical organization of both text and graphics. Be sure your webpage is properly balanced and organized into logical information zones. Avoid clutter that will cause a distraction.

If you ask why something works and you push back far enough, eventually everything seems to be based on contrast: the ability to distinguish one thing from another. Composition, sequencing, even legibility all rely on devices that affect the contrast between things.

Chris Pulman, The Education of a Graphic Designer

Information, presented on a webpage, follows its own rules of balance and organization is the key. The main focus of the page should be the most obvious thing a visitor sees. This would be in the title of the page and the header text. Next follows the content or body copy. Placed at the heart of the webpage your main content text will be naturally seen by the visitor as a natural progression of the title and they will read on.

Focus

Avoid placing navigation bars, ads and links in inappropriate places on your page. (e.g. most clicks on ads come from the ones that are embedded in the content of the page anyway) They should never detract from the main focus of your webpage. These should always be treated as supporting elements only, never as points of focus or allowing them to become distractions from your main content.

The focus of a webpage should always be its main message. Other elements, even necessary ones, should be seen as framing the content and must never be allowed to overpower it. Keep your supporting material unobtrusive and present your message as the focus of your webpage by careful framing and emphasis.