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Point Your Visitors At The Content
By Dustin Brewer
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-10-11
It is important to remember why your web site is around, if you lose direction with it you can easily fall prey to having a lot of fancy web site but not much purpose for your visitors.
I see this all to often in the web design field where a client wants a lot of fancy stuff and they lose track of why they have a web site in the first place. If you sell clothing, you want it to be extremely straight forward about how to find and buy clothing. Not how cool your flash/ajax looks.
I read a great article from Sonia Simone today over at her site remarkable communication. Her post inspired me to write about this same idea with some focus on web sites specifically.
Zip, roar, crash bang!
It seems that in the midst of the web 2.0 craze that a lot of sites want to make sure that they have big fancy headers and creative AJAX stuff that moves around a lot and makes things happen really quickly. However, some have focused a little to hard on making things look really high tech and cool and not so much on the reason people are visiting the site.
There are a lot of sites that I visit and really like the content but have a hard time discerning exactly where the content starts and where the flashy stuff and advertisements end. Sonia brings this point to light perfectly in her reference to a flying meatball sandwich that was in her way of ordering a pizza because she couldn't figure out where the place was located and their phone number.
Making your site usable with arrows
The best way to ensure that you put focus on the right part of your site is to make sure that there is a call to action, or that the design has something metaphorically pointing at the important part of your site. This can be done easily by adding contrast to the area that is most important. For instance, here on my site (and most blogs) the area where the actual articles are is a completely different color that stands out above the rest of the site.
However, this doesn't mean you want to make everything else to blend in. You just make it contrast in a different way. The more ways you have things stand out above the layout the easier it is going to be for your visitors to understand how your site works and enable them to navigate the site better.
No pot of gold at the end of this rainbow
There is a limit to how many contrasting elements you can have in a web site, you don't want a rainbow of colors to make everything jump out at you (and scare visitors away). The best way to ensure that you don't create a usability mess of your site is to group different elements together and then add slight variances of that area for different elements within that section. The better things are grouped together in contrast with the rest of your site the more flow your site will have for people to navigate around it easier.
The way I like to design is to jump on over to Adobe's Kuler and wander through their color palletes or create my own color palette based on some popular color schemes. This enables me to ensure that I have a set color scheme that I want to stick with and I don't accidentally add too many colors to the site making it look like a rainbow. This doesn't mean you pick 4 colors and just stick with it but generally speaking it is best to stay within those colors and only add slight variances (shades/tints) to the colors if you need another color. To better understand what I mean you might check out my article on understanding color in design. It is a little old and needs a little updating but it is still helpful for those curious about color and its uses within design.
You can also check out my article on CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) design to better understand using contrast in design effectively.
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About the Author:
Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.
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