Focus Your Site Design

Web Design July 24, 2007

It's amazing to me sometimes how little people know about design. They seem to know all the stereotypes or what generally looks good, but they don't necessarily understand the concept of interface design or color scheme or focus.

I was looking up a restaurant online the other day because I wanted to look at the menu. Instead, I got a Flash application that took a minute to load and then presented me with all these different animations, loud music (which I was not expecting) and crazy colors. It took me a while before I could actually find where the menu was. And even then, it wasn't linked in the right way. Yeah, the site looked pretty, but it really took away from its focus.

Focus.

A lot of the time, people will either over-design their site or under-design it. The example above evinces the over-design aspect. It's a restaurant. Most people would go to the site to find out (a) where it's located, (b) how to make reservations and (c) the menu. If all that information is easily attainable, then it's ok to go ahead with all the other stuff.

The other end of the spectrum is the under-design - and you tend to see these kind of sites when someone just wants to put up some information quickly. Sometimes it's a real shame too, because the content is important and it's just displayed terribly.

So when thinking about the design for a website, think carefully about its focus. Sometimes you can embellish the design with lots of colors and images for effect. Other times, you might just want simple lines, light colors and emphasize the text (and you'll want to look into typography for that).

The other thing of importance, besides color and content, is the development side. Some sites use too much Javascript when they don't need to. Others use too many page refreshes and it gets annoying if you constantly need to be clicking through page to page. Consider adding a small bit of Javascript and/or AJAX functionality to toggle the page content.

Consider all these ideas and implement the ones you think are necessary. If done right, it can make a world of difference to the user.

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