Beside that, as technology changes, practice changes also, which means that we should constantly monitor the news and practically learn something new every day. However, there are many useful tips on the Internet, and those who are not, and based on them is made this list of 8 basic principles that every web designer should consider during web sites making.
1) Guiding
What we want to achieve when people come to the site, is to follow some logic of watching and reading content in a way that you imagined. For example, if the word is about some company site, the first thing that should be noticed is the logo, and because of that it needs to be big enough and situated on the most noticeable place (e.g. in the upper left corner, because that’s the place most people first look at). Designer determines how much weight every site element would have, and thus guide visitor that on the certain way goes through pages. Certain site element can be highlighted by combining techniques such as, for example, position on the page, color or size.
2) Space
Starter mistake for many web designers is the attitude that every possible gap should be filled with some element, and that the empty space is the waste of time. That is not true, of course, because without space between certain site elements there is not visibility. We must think of three things: the space between the lines (which directly affects the readability of the content), the space between image and text (the rule is that there’s always should be the space between image and the text) and empty space on the page so-called white space.
3) Navigation
Nobody enjoys searching through bad organized site, where after a few clicks we get lost and have no idea where we are or how to return to the part where we already were. There are two basic rules we need to think to: the navigation buttons should be at any time in a visible place (on top of the page) and to clearly and precisely describe where they lead to. Second, visitor has to know in every moment on what site part is he or she located, which can be accomplished by menus, buttons and/or site map.
4) Design implementation
CSS has pretty facilitated development of the web sites, but still, when we work in Photoshop we must think about design implementation itself, accordingly about site construction itself. Web designer should think about next things: can we really make that in the way we imagined it (exotic font is not standard HTML font and therefore it can’t be used; the design looks great, but the width is 1500 px and most of the visitors will see only a part, accordingly they will have to use horizontal scrolling, and nobody likes that), what is the page size, accordingly what is happening in the search engine page views, and whether some minor changes in the design will highly facilitate website development.
5) Typography
There are no sites without a certain amount of text, so choosing the font is important item of web design. There should be considered the type of font (it must match the content, therefore modern or retro font etc., and in any case- it must be legible and it must fit into the rest of the site, and we should not exaggerate in the types of font on the site, everything over three is exaggeration and mostly bad taste), the size of the font (font big enough to be easily read and titles and subtitles should be separated from the rest of the text), line spacing and length of the lines (if it’s too long, it is hard to read), font color and text organization in the passages (longer text must be broken into passages between which we have space, otherwise there is no chance that the visitor would read the text).
6) The relationship between site elements
Site is composed of several parts (header, sections, illustrations, ...) and each part should be independent, but all parts should be mutually well organized and in the correctly relationships. So, the order must exist, and elements should be placed on the site according to the rule. In this way we facilitate visitors’ orientation, and everything looks a lot better.
7) The precision and clarity
The simplest, everything must be precise in the pixel. Check the edges, whether they are equal, is there a clear contrast between site parts, and whether the boundaries are clearly defined.
8) Consistency
This means that everything has to fit with each other and thus makes a visually attractive unit. So, the size of titles and subtitles, selection of font, color, buttons style, space, image, everything we have mentioned, all of that should be stylish equable, both on the one page and on all the others mutually. Only in this way the design looks professional and high quality. This can easily be accomplished by defining the basic style settings at the start, accordingly by choosing the basic concept, and then we apply it during the entire site development. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the certain ideas will not change during site construction, but basic ideas must be clearly defined and should not be changed too often. Be sure to specify with the client whether that is what he wants, so that in the end you don’t have to do everything from the scratch.
