Good Web Design Principles

By Vashti

There are some web design Words of Wisdom in the wider community that'll help you tremendously while building your web page. If you apply these principles you'll build a page that loads reasonably quickly for most people and is easy on the eye.

As a rule, it’s best to have no more than 4 colours on your web page. Any more than that and your web page starts to look busy and confusing.

You can chose a palette for your page with a dark background and light text, or a light background and dark text. Either can work. However, a light background is generally better because it is easier on the eyes of your visitors.

Here is a sample of a palette that could be applied to any web page. Believe it or not, I lifted it from a set of eye shadows I found online. The top left colour would be ideal for your page background. The chocolate brown colour would be wonderful for text. The two pinks would make wonderful colours for your headers and bars!

The same rule applies to fonts. If you use more than 3 different fonts on any given web page, your visitors will find it messy and will worry that you’re having a personality crisis. Stick to three fonts and keep track of what you’re using so you’re using the same font throughout the site.

When you are chosing the fonts for the site, you need to make at least one choice a common font like Arial or Verdana. If you specify three obscure fonts, your site will default back to Times New Roman on your visitor’s computer and will just look UGLY!

I will say this only once: Textured backgrounds, sound files that play automatically, and animations are EVIL and they must be destroyed!!! It looks really pretty when we load it up on our computer because our computer is storing those files. When someone else loads the page from where it’s stored, they don’t have that background file and it takes an unnecessary and sometimes stupid amount of time for those files to load. This is time where they can become impatient and leave your site.

So, don’t use textured backgrounds, sound, or animation that plays automatically on your page under any circumstances unless you only want a site that 5 friends will see. Even if you’re really good at creating CC, you will still miss out on visitors who will appreciate your stuff because they will get impatient waiting for the site to load and will leave. It is much simpler to have a basic coloured background. It will look just as nice and will load much more quickly.

Navigation is one of those places where you need to keep things extremely simple. To use a ludicrous example: you’d get frustrated if you went to a site and saw a link that said “cheeses”. When you clicked on that link, expecting to find cheese, you instead found an essay on Labrador puppies. The big thing to remember is Keep It Simple Stupid. Links should reflect the content that they're leading to.

The second thing to remember is, when people are coming to visit your Sims site, they only really care about downloads. So most of your links should relate to your downloads, and only a few to things like staff information, FAQs, and other information.

You want people to be able to find your lovely work and appreciate it rather than get frustrated not knowing where to look, and then leave.

This is something most people don’t think about enough. When you design a page, every single thing you add to that page slows down the loading time of that page. So it’s always best to make your choices very carefully and limit how many complex elements you use. That way you don’t “overspend” and “bankrupt” your bandwidth budget. Again, people will leave your site because your page is stuck repeating “Greensleaves” and a weird whirling graphic because your bandwidth has been exceeded and it won't load anything else.

If you stick to these principles you will have a happy, harmonious, well put together site that people love to visit and will revisit often!

Regards,

Vashti and Macgirlffx