The well-designed website

Balance, organization and focus

The well designed website has balance, organization and focus. If all the pages on your website follow that kind of pattern, they will have that clean, uniform look that most web designers go for. Cluttered and disorganized content turns people off. Don’t underestimate the power of your website design, as it can make or break a website.

Optically clean and user-friendly graphic design and text are essential to a website’s credibility. A well thought-out approach to website design will provide easy navigation, user-friendly access, and present your content clearly for the visitor to assimilate. Balance is essential for this.

Balance

Balancing the content of your web pages is about more than producing an attractive design. Providing a means for your visitors to easily scan your web pages is far more important. People visiting your website are looking for specific information and / or product details and the earlier they find it, the better your website will perform.

Producing a well-balanced website design involves presenting your visitor with a pleasant visual experience. Most high-performance websites demonstrate this effect through clean, well-focused designs. The moment your eye perceives this type of web page, there is a sense of order and balance. The eye will catch this type of design as a nice, neat and organized pattern.

Organization

A well-designed web page makes good use of white space to guide the view through the content. It also emphasizes the main features of the page with a logical organization of both the text and the graphics. Make sure your web page is properly balanced and organized into logical information zones. Avoid distracting clutter.

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

Chris Pulman, the education of a graphic designer

The information, presented on a web page, 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 page title and the header text. Then follow the content or body of the text. Placed in the heart of the web page, the visitor will naturally see the main content text as a natural progression of the title and will continue reading.

Focus

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

The focus of a web page should always be its main message. Other elements, even necessary ones, should be seen as framing the content and should never be allowed to dominate it. Keep your supporting material discreet and present your message as the focus of your web page with careful framing and emphasis.