The Power of Choice in Web Design
When you decide to create a website, you surely have some purpose in mind you want to achieve for creating and maintaining that website. Generally, people will not make websites just for the heck of it, even if many claim that they are maintaining their web pages just for fun, or to be able to share some stuff with other online users. Evidently that also has a purpose, although not exactly in the league of more seemingly “worthy” purposes like being for business, for academic purposes, for promotion of nonprofit purposes, for fun and entertainment, for communication and other social functions, and many other possible purposes for the creation of websites.
Having one, some or all of these purposes in mind when one builds his website will surely give direction to the way choices are made relating to everything that goes to the component web pages in his site. When you design a website, you make your choices based on how you want it to look, what sections and which content you want emphasized, what color scheme you will employ, which navigation scheme will bring out the best in your website, and so on. In web design you are required to make many different choices, all of them consequential in determining your website’s success, in turn determined by website user response, web traffic and the stats on return visitors.
Here are key considerations in properly exercising the power of choice in web design:
Know your website purpose by heart, and stick with it. The overall design of your website is to be guided by your purpose for creating it. Such purpose may be more serious endeavors, or some other purpose that may be trivial; nonetheless keep it in mind such that all your website elements: layout, navigation, color scheme, animation (if any), music, and many others both visual and textual, work towards a coherent whole.
Work towards achieving content – design balance. It has oft been said that however rich and substantial the content of your website is, the performance of your website and the effectiveness of the content will still be dependent on the way they are presented in web pages. You cannot fully focus on content or on design only, there has to be a balance of both in order to create a website and to convey what you intend to convey through that website.
Validate your choices. Test your design. Test for response. Acknowledge that what may look good and most acceptable for you may not work for your target audience. You may not know with accuracy which design and copy works best if you do not test, by which you make your intended readers decide. After all, you are creating your website with them in mind, so their response is of paramount importance.
Indeed, the choices we make in web design are determinative of our website’s success. However, we cannot make these choices based solely on how we perceive design, content and response to be, but based on the actual feedback from web users. We should learn to achieve this balance to make responsive websites.
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