Why am I writing this? Well I served in the military and we had a saying that sticks with me till this day KISS(Keep It Simple & Stupid). With the web becoming more and more complex every day I felt like I was starting to lose track of what is really important when building a website. This is my way of pushing the complex things aside and keep it KISS so I don’t lose my sanity.
1. Purpose 🔥
Every website needs a reason to be there in the first place right? So most important thing for a site is to have a purpose. This is perhaps why themes or templates are broken down by category like business, services, restaurants, informative, forum, etc…
2. Theme 🖌️
Colors
When it comes to design I am by no means a master but I do know that blank pages are scary. One thing that definitely helps is to have a theme. Meaning you need a good color palette for your site why? Because there are 10 million colors discernible to the human eye and a computer can display about 16.8 million you could waste a lot of time choosing colors if you don’t decide on a palette.
Fonts
While colors are very important you also need to ensure you have good fonts. There are tons of fonts to choose from but what I mean by good fonts is do they flow together? Do they have proper line spacing? Are they easily readable? These things are quite important since most websites generally use text to get their point across. Would you give a public speech drunk? I assume not so why have sloshy drunk fonts instead of clear and concise ones?
3. Layout 🏗️
Golden Ratio
When laying out a site it is very important to have good spacing and placement. The golden ratio is a term that designers use to describe perfect placement of elements or near perfect. Why is there so much s p a c I n g here? Cause I am showing horrible spacing and what a nightmare it could be on a site. A good way of checking if you have proper spacing and placement is to use grid lines. Use a grid line tool on your site and you will instantly see how you can get closer to the golden ratio.
Flow
Another key ingredient to layout is the flow of your content. It annoying would be have to if read you’re like this site. Are you having trouble reading that sentence? Good so now you understand why flow is important. Not only is important for your site to have order and make sense but if you want good SEO and for search engines to properly index your site you want to make sure things are in order and that you are using the appropriate html tags.
4. Navigation 🗺️
I have seen so many sites with amazing navigation but suck at actually navigating the site and vice versa. However I firmly believe if you had to choose one it should be function over form meaning you should absolutely prioritize being able to navigate your site easily and sensibly before you worry about how beautiful your menu is. Notice how the title of this section is navigation and not menu? Well that’s because you can use way more than just a menu to navigate your site. Scrolling, clicking, buttons, double taps, and the sky is the limit because you can use all these user inputs to help navigate although I suggest always having a fallback of the all powerful click.
5. Footer 🦶
Many different options here but I believe the main purpose of the footer is to reiterate or summarize the purpose of your site. Which is why you will most likely see contact info or a call to action. Many of the sites primary content should be listed here as well as works cited or credits to resources you used to build the service. Oh and this thing ©.
6. Content 📰
Last but not least is the meat and potatoes of your site. Why are people there? Probably because of google but the real reason is that there was a need and google is only a medium to fulfill that need. The content should follow all the guidelines described in the layout section in addition to fulfilling needs or at least guiding them to the next steps to take to do that. Don't waste peoples time with filler or things that are completely irrelevant and contradictory to your sites purpose.
In Closing
🔚 thats it 🔚
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