The design of your website is like the architecture of a building. It is the construction of your website.
There are two areas on which the presentation of a website design depends.
- The Layout
- Navigation
From the layout point of view here are a few points:
1. Website Design Layout Type: Symmetrical
These are the simple, straight layouts. They have the conventional look with symmetrical alignments. Content is most often placed at the center and other information is placed on the side bars.
Your Innovation: Keeping the focus on content is a great idea. Don’t change that. However, be creative with the presentation of your content. Keep catchy headlines and smart paragraph breaks and don’t make your content too long, keep it crisp.
2. Website Design Layout Type: Asymmetrical
This is great when you are an artist and have a portfolio of work to show. Your works can be presented across the site in blocks of information. Again, there’s no specific rule about how this information will be displayed. You have to get creative and see what you want to do. For instance, for various photography campaigns, you could do a pictorial cover page presentation in an asymmetrical form and then display various works as when people click on the particular image.
Moreover, these layouts can further support an aggressive presentation of content as with a dominant layout, wherein you emphasize on things you want to say. In an isolative layout, visuals are often used and the navigation pages such as Home and Contact are reduced to small areas.
It’s the preview of what you want to convey that should drive the selection of the layout.
From the Navigation Point of View:
Navigation is something you can use very wisely. Rather than letting the user simply wander on your website, you can show them the direction in which he can wander. In other words, strategic placement of content, tabs and pages can help direct your users to pages that you want them to read.
For instance:
- The region above the fold (that is, the region that the user sees without scrolling on the page) is evidently important because that’s one space he is bound to see.
- As per human behavior, we read from left to right hand side, hence content on the left hand side, again, holds importance.
- Things that are simply added factors, like a social plug-in, should be placed on the right bar. Users don’t look there first, but do check it out if they have time towards the end.
Besides this, navigation also relates to your content and linking to other pages. Your web design must support good internal and external linking. Moreover, small things like hyperlinking one page to another, appropriate color change on hyperlinks once visited, and appropriate highlights for hyperlinks are very important because these help users to easily navigate through your website and stay a bit longer.
Hence, the layout and navigation on your website are important aspects of website design. While aspiring to create an effective website design, these little things cannot be neglected!
About the Author
Divya works with web development and areas of online presence and website marketing. As an expert analyst, she has great experience in SEO, SMO and SMM as well.
