pjrvs — the blog of paul jarvis

web design tips for non-web-designers

so, you’ve hired someone (a professional) to design your website. the following are a set of helpful rules to keep in mind when asking for things during the web design process – ensuring you get the most return-per-visit (whether it’s making you money, having your content read, having a quiz filled out, or whatever else your website’s goal relates to).

3 colours are enough.

a good colour palette will make or break your website (but no pressure, right?). so if you are providing a designer a colour palette, make sure it is awesome – otherwise anything designed in that palette will not be. if you’re letting your designer pick the palette, it’s helpful to give them general guidelines, i.e. “darker teal with light beige and a splash of orange”. this will help them be able to mathematically choose colours (based on complimentary, triadic, tetradic or analogolic schemas) that match each other and feel like they fit together.

2 typefaces are enough.

first, me clarify the difference between a font and a typeface. the first (a font) is a complete set of characters in the same style. a typeface is a set of fonts – a collection of normal, bold, italic, thin, etc. so “times roman” is a font, and “times roman, times bold and times italic”, as a group, is a typeface called “times”. now that we’ve established that – don’t use more than 2 typefaces on your website, or it’ll look junky and unprofessional. why? the key, as with colours, is to establish an overall feel on your website, and the more typefaces you add, the less specific your website’s style will be.

everything doesn’t need to go on your navigation bar.

a general rule of thumb is that no more than 5-8 items should go on your website’s top-level navigation. if you have more pages, you can nest them under top-level navigation items, using drop downs and/or sub level navigation (i.e. the list of pages within a section on the sidebar). this makes the navigation easy to scan quickly so people can find what they’re looking for. what if you have more pages? consider a secondary menu in the footer for less important pages (like legal pages, or terms of service). if you find yourself with more than 30 pages (this doesn’t include blog posts), then you should re-think how you want to organize information on your website, since it’ll take more time than most people want to spend trying to figure out where to go on your website.

white space is not just for minimalist and art projects.

white space is breath of an interface, and what helps draw attention to the individual elements you want people to see or click on. if things are too squished together, they can blend together in a bad way. text especially needs ample room on all sides to be easily legible. it’s been scientifically proven (by scientists!) that people will actually scroll. so while it’s important to put your top priorities (see next point) high up the page, everything doesn’t need to be squished above the fold.

prioritize.

before going to a web designer, know exactly what your objectives are for having the website in the first place. then, use those objectives to list out every element you want on your website the helps you achieve those objectives. you don’t need a nerdy wire frame program to do this – draw it, paint it or use your ipad’s sketch app. list out things like: logo, navigation bar, 3 call to action buttons, a list of your 5 best blog posts, your latest 3 blog posts with short excerpts, a search box, a contact form, your email/phone number, etc. then put them in order – what is the most important element for people to find right off the bat – and that should stand out the most. if every element stood out, nothing would stand out, since it’d all be equally weighted. you need to prioritize, and be ok with the fact that some things will be smaller and have less visual weight than others.

content is king.

for my snarkier readers, if you sell photographs or movies, that’s your content (so it still applies). people will come to your website to read your blog, buy a product or find out more about a service you offer. getting them to do those things is the important task. the design of the website is the glue that holds those things together in a cohesive and uniform way. if it’s is well designed, then your content will shine in a gorgeous way.

there are standards for a reason.

if you have a crazy new idea for a form on your website be designed, make sure it intuitively still looks like a form. otherwise no one will know they can type into it. same goes for links – make sure they look like links. it’s good to be unique in your style, but make sure to keep true to standards for online interaction, or else there won’t be any interaction to be had.

conformity (in this case) is not boring.

with the exception of some art or wacky proof of concepts, there’s a reason every website keeps certain elements in the exact same spot on every single page. it makes every new page easy and fast to identify where on the screen to look for new content from page to page. so the logo, navigation, sidebar, footer, etc should all stay in the same place, on all pages. yes, they can vary slightly, but have a good reason for the variation. it’s only boring that the layout is the same on all pages if the content is boring. if the content changes (and content can be words, photos, videos, etc), then that’s what matters the most. the same goes for content – if every line is a different size, weight, colour, font, then it’ll take at least twice as long to read and be super annoying as well. give people a reason to read, and they will (rainbow colours and contrasting type sizes is not a good reason).

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i hope these tips help when you are working with a web designer get the best possible outcome from the design process.

and remember, the overall goal of website design is to provide (a) clear information and navigation to more information, and (b) a sense of style for the website that gives off a specific vibe (i.e. branding) without using any words/descriptions. so the more elements, photos, widgets, bits of text, illustrations colours, typefaces, etc you add, the more you dilute your brand’s style. and this isn’t “just for minimalists”, this is for every website, ever. less is more – more clarity, more style, and more immediate understanding from visitors, who will in turn, actually get to where you want them to go on your website.

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