When you are a website designer, starting on a project can sometimes be the hardest part. Once you have an idea of what you want to do, you can usually find a way to implement it. Let’s look at some ways to get ideas and inspiration for when you are stuck on a design project.
One of the best ways to start is to figure out what kind of look you are designing for. If you are designing for a client with a specific need, think about what kind of look you are trying to convey. Are they a business which is striving to give off a look of reliability and stability, or are they going for a more new wave look? Try to start from what kind of look and feel you need for the site, and then expound off of that.
If you don’t have a specific look which you are going for (like if you are just trying to create a design for a portfolio or if there isn’t a specific message you are trying to convey), then you will need to find inspiration from something else. Usually a good approach for this is to find something which inspires you to create the rest of the design. For some designers, this can be choosing a color palette, and then figuring out where specific elements go based on the color scheme. Many good tools exist for generating good looking color palettes. One good way to find color inspiration is to find photos that you like and pick colors out of them.
Another great place to get inspiration is from a web design gallery. You don’t have to copy another designer’s work to learn from them. When looking at other websites, find specific elements which you like – maybe you like how the navigation on one site is designed, and the colors on the footer area in another. Combine various elements and add your own touch to complete it into a polished web design.
Getting started on a project can be difficult, but usually the best solution is to find something that inspires you and use it as a basis for the rest of the design.
Web Browser support for HTML 5 support is increasing at an ever increasing pace. HTML 5 provides several new design elements for website forms by adding new tags and improving old ones. The INPUT tag has several new attributes and input types. Some attributes remove the need for cumbersome JavaScript scripts for form validation, and others simply make the forms easier to use.
New INPUT Tag Attributes
autocomplete – Values: ON/OFF: Tells the web browser to either auto-fill the form field if the user returns to the page using previous data, or to disable the feature.
autofocus – Values: AUTOFOCUS: This tells the web browser to give focus to this field upon page load
pattern – Values: pattern: This allows for the web browser to automatically validate the field’s contents based upon the regular expression supplied (i.e. [0-9] means only numeric characters are accepted)
placeholder – Values: text: This tells the browser to display the text supplied when the field is empty. The text will be slightly lighter in color than the regular text color to indicate that it is a placeholder.
required – Values: required: Defined field is required for the submission of its form.
New INPUT Tag Input Types
color – only color values
date – only date values
datetime – only timestamps [HH:MM:
datetime-local – Only timestamps in local time format
email – Only e-mail addresses
month – Only months
number – Only numeric characters; no text values
range – Range of values
tel – Only telephone numbers
time – Only time values
url – Only URLs
week – Only week values
Page Layout refers to the layout of information on a website while design rerfers more stylized choices such as colors and font types. These two ideas blend together harmoniously for the information provided below. Imagine the first time you saw a web page with yellow font on a white background and animated GIF files everywhere — you left the site pretty quickly I bet.
Page Layout Ideas
1. Page Length – Pages should be no more than one page in length if possible. Important information
Page Design should be listed closest to the top, and ]
2. Page Navigation – Sufficient navigation menu(s) should allow the users to traverse all of your website’s content in a quick and easy manner. Confusing or non-existent navigation systems will definitely frustrate website visitors.
3. Use DIV elements rather than TABLE elements to arrange information on your page. DIV elements provide more flexible options and a professional look.
4. No Horizontal Scrolling – Vertical Scrolling is bad enough, but horizontal scrolling is practically unforgivable. Many a website have had users leave simply because horizontal scrolling makes page navigation hard and it makes pages look sloppy.
Page Design Ideas
1. Theme – All pages should have a similar theme throughout a website. This can easily be accomplished via cascading style-sheets (CSS).
2. Colors – Colors should provide good definition and contrast, which allows website viewers to view your content and spend more of their time reading your content. Poor color choices can and will scare away prospective visitors and/or buyers.
3. Fonts – Fonts should be easily read by both web browser and humans. Only make use of fonts readily available on all Windows/Mac OSX machines. Specification of a custom or different font will only lead to confused or frustrated visitors.
4. Whitespace – Space around elements and page borders frames the content that you want website visitors to see. Too little whitespace makes a website look cluttered, un-organized, and somewhere to be avoided for purchases.