Website Design Fundamentals to Master

When learning any new discipline it is important to build a solid foundation of knowledge based on the subject and then gradually build upon this foundation. This is especially true when it comes to learning how to create cool website designs. Understanding these website design fundamentals will allow you to incrementally build upon the separate subject points and build a tower of knowledge which you can apply to all of your website design projects. Here are some points to focus on when honing your website design skills.

Website Color Scheme

Color plays a vital role when creating cool website designs and will affect the websites look, feel, and identity. Part of a website’s usability has to do with how users feel when they arrive and navigate through your site; whether they realize it or not. Color can and does have a psychological influence and can have an affect how your users feel while interacting on your website. Using colors that clash when used together will be a put-off for your visitors. Color schemes can help to ensure that the colors you choose for your design all work together in harmony.

There are some great tools available to help pick out the color scheme for your next design project. Paletton, Color Scheme Designer is an HTML color picker that makes coming up with a color scheme super simple. Simply click the area of the color wheel that you would like to use for your base color. Then you can select from monochromatic, adjacent, triad, tetrad or free style schemes. Affect the shade of your scheme by dragging the points in the center of the wheel and tweak individual points by holding down shift.

Website Page Layout

It might be tempting to head straight to your computer to start experimenting with different layouts when starting a new design. This may actually be more of a hindrance then a help in the early stages of your design. Roughing out some sketches with a regular old pencil and paper will afford you the opportunity to scratch out several ideas in a much shorter period of time and without the distractions that can be brought on when working on your computer.

The main goals in defining your page layout will have quite a bit to do with the subject matter and content at hand as it relates to the website as a whole. Organize the content and subject matter so that you can properly visualize what information needs to be displayed and what page layout would best suit this information.

Most page layouts will be comprised of some pretty common items such as a logo appearing in the header area of the page, a navigation area, a footer area, and of course an area that features the main content of the page. Some common forms of page layouts include center, left-hand and right-hand navigation layouts. Each layout describes the area where the main navigation presides.

Users that arrive at your website will be using varying types of devices, all having different screen sizes and resolutions. This poses a challenge when it comes to creating a website design that will remain consistent and look how we intended when viewed on varying devices. The answer to this problem comes in the way of responsive website designs. Responsive website designs allow us to create a fluid layout that will adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions automatically by using CSS3 and media queries. In this way, our designs continue to look spectacular regardless of the devices that they are viewed on.