Ten Tips for Better Site Design
Before starting a project, carefully write down a statement of the goals of the site. How do you know what your goals are? Simple. Ask your client. If you're your own client, ask yourself what you would say if you contracted the project to an outside firm. This is critical to keeping everyone in the project directed and satisfied with the outcome. It also provides a constructive basis for design decisions during the project. When you're in the middle of a long term project, it gets too easy to forget why you're doing it. Having a clearly stated goal goes a long way towards resolving this issue, and can often settle design arguments in a way that both sides agree with.
Using a consistent page design across a site can seem "boring" or "uncreative" at first. Stay with it. The consistency of design of a site is one of the factors that differentiates amateur sites from professional ones. Yes, at times you may end up with individual pages that are not as satisfying as they might have been had you designed them individually. But your site will have a consistent look across all pages that will allow users to know immediately when they enter your site, and that will help them remember your site as well.
Designing on the site level also means that your work becomes far easier for others to extend. Don't expect to always be the person working on a site - most of a site's life is maintenance, rather than design. If you can create a site with a well defined and codified page structure, you will enable people with less experience and design savvy to work on updating and extending the site. This is critical if you want to go on to creating other sites, and your customers will appreciate it greatly when they are faced with updating their site.
When you design in HTML, you end up with pages that look like every other page designed in HTML. You shouldn't arrive at a design simply because it's easy to do in HTML, or it's something you know how to do. You should want to create in HTML a design your envisioned without considering the messy reality of HTML. Using HTML 3.0, just about anything is possible... it's just not necessarily easy. Solving the problems of expressing a design in HTML are trivial - once you already know exactly what your design should be.
Some of my best designs were done sitting in the sun with a pad and pencil. Wouldn't you rather do that then sit in front of the computer fighting with HTML??? So even if you don't believe me, give it a try. At the worst, you'll get to sit in the sun for an hour.
When you create that great design that is going to be the centerpiece of your site, write down how you did it! Write down anything that you can't extract later. This includes typefaces (font, font size, leading, spacing, attributes, etc.), graphical effects (how many pixels was the gaussian blur on the drop shadow?), and anything else you might forget.
A corollary of this is to always save a copy of what you created in Photoshop from the point before you flattened the image. Save a copy in Photoshop format with all the layers, etc intact. This is a lot of critical information being saved, as well as preserving separately graphic elements you might need later on.
To create an actual page, you simply make a copy of a template and stick in the content particular to that page between the existing HTML. Not only does this approach save a significant amount of time and effort, but it also reduces HTML errors. Also, it means that someone other than the lead page designer can be responsible for the creation of site pages, without the designer being worried about major errors in the design of pages.
Part of this is using clever design to reduce the download size of pages. Every time you can reduce the size of a graphic, you've moved closer to making the perfect site. This doesn't mean you should be using tiny little unreadable graphics - far from it. It means that when you do choose to use a graphic, you should be making the best use of the download time. If you have to create graphic with large areas of white space, step back and consider what you're doing - there is something fundamentally inefficient going on.
Consistency (here we go again) can also help speed users through a site. If you use a graphic over and over (say a logo or nav bar) it adds content to pages without increasing download time. This is because once a user downloads a graphic, it stays in their cache and the browser doesn't need to download it again. For this to work, make sure they're accessing the same file or URL for the image, not just the same graphic.
Here's a easy example of the kind of stuff I'm talking about. When you're choosing icons for a site, take the graphics, and print them out, without any labels or text on them. Photocopy them and give them to a couple of people who don't know what the icons symbolize on your site. Ask the users to write down what they think the icons might symbolize on a web site. (Don't ask them to specify this for your web site - have them do it for any web site.) If more than half the answers for a particular icon are right, you're probably OK. If not, it's time to go back to hunting through those clip art files for a new icon.
Yes, design is important, and only with both good design and good content can you have a truly great site. But don't ever sacrifice content on the altar of good design. You may be happier with your design as a result, but what does that matter if there aren't any users to see your great design?
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