Glossy-Neo

Having a good layout

A website layout is the first thing people see when they come to your site, you want to make the first impression a good one don't you? To make sure, here is a guide filled with tips to making your website layout great!

Image

Usually a site has a top banner or main image, in the case that your site layout does, here are some things to consider:

Quality - is your image of the topmost quality, this isnt talking about how you saved it but whether or not it shows off your skills! Have you used textures and brushes well? If there is multiple images in one, have they been well blended? Try your best at this particular image, take your time, you want it to make people want to look at the graphics you make for them to use! There is no way you want to turn them off your graphics first off, just because the top banner is of a really bad quality!
Appeal - Do people other than you think it is a really nice image or does it just hurt their eyes? Try to make an image that doesn't make anyone want to turn tail and run! Ask people what they think of it and use their advice to make an even better image next time!
Theme - Think about the theme of your website, if it is neo-related, isnt it going to confuse people if they turn up and find a pokemon layout? Try to make people be sure of what kind of site you have by making sure the layout suits!
Are you proud of it - if you don't think it is the best job you could have done on the image, then work a bit longer to make one that really makes you proud to say you made it! You will feel a lot better about yourself if you make sure it is something to show off.

Colour Scheme

The colour scheme is very important, so make sure you spend plenty of time choosing colours properly!

First thing to make sure of is that the colours you choose do not clash, that means you are going to have to put your love of all things flouro away, to save anyone losing their sight! This is just plain courtesy.. Also make sure nothing is flashing uncontrollably, this can make a person seriously sick!

Another thing to think of is the colours in the image. If you have a program that allows you to pick colours out of an image, you could pick some colours that work together well from the image and make a colour palette to use in your styling!

Choosing colours out of an image may be all well and good although you may not want to choose more than three or four colours, this can make the layout unbearably busy and a bit too much! Just don't be too careful and make a terribly boring colour scheme! Try using different shades of just two colours, just keep it interesting.

Loading time

Some people these days still have dial-up, so what may load in a couple of second on one connection may take up to 5 or 10 minutes on another! This is just a bit of information on some of the things you may need to be aware of when making sure your layout/site will load fairly quickly.

It is true that people tend to get sick of waiting for a site to load within maybe 10 seconds, they minimise the window and come back to it a bit later, depending on the person, if the site hasnt loaded within a minute, they may close the window and never see how great your site may actually be! So to make sure you arent losing valuable visitors because of how long it takes for your site to load, here are some ways to reduce the loading time.

If you know someone who has dial-up or a slower connection, ask them [nicely!] if they could time how long it takes to load up. If it does take a while, think about some things, how large are the image files - if they are large, you can save them as a different file, .gif and .jpg tend to be smaller. Do you use many javascript features - they can take a lot of time to load [plus, they don't always work] and arent always useful.

When reducing the time it takes to load your site, don't always think that a smaller file will be better, make sure you keep a good quality!

Browser

As you know, there are many different browsers that people choose to use, it is only fair that you try to make sure that your site looks fine in most of them, here are some ways you can make sure of this.

Validating your HTML or CSS is a great way to make sure that your site will work correctly in most browsers! To be quite honest, I find that it is a pain in the neck and suggest that you only try this if you have plenty of time and understand it really well.

Test your layout in a few browsers before putting it up, I test mine in Firefox and IE, it doesn't work entirely well but my layouts now look reasonable in both! This can be very frustrating.. but it is very important that none of your visitors are missing out, even though it was their choice of browser!

Some browsers don't understand particular features, for example, Firefox doesn't read scrollbar coding, so there isn't much point coding scrollbars! Firefox also allows the user to block javascript and I am sure that many people would use that, so why bother having something that takes forever to load and some people wont use anyway?

Organisation

This is a really important thing for a website because if no one can find anthing, then they arent going to come back! I like to have organisation just because that is just the way I am, it is nice to have a place for everything and to have everything in its place!

So to make sure people understand the navigation, make it obvious! None of these complex navigations that no one understands [just like a menu having a concept!] Make it easy to find, it is fine to have one of those side navigations or have it across the top, sure it's old fashioned but it couldn't have gotten old if it didn't work!

Make sure the layout makes sense! Have things positioned so that they work together, not so everything is everywhere, simple and neat is a good thing. Have things alphabetical, it is the best way to have them, then everyone can find what they are looking for and not have to read through a massive navigation a couple of times just to figure out that your site doesn't have what they were looking for!

Conclusion

I hope you have learnt something for this guide, I am sure it has given you some ideas on how to improve your layout, if it wasn't already great to start with! If you have any feedback, further questions or comments, feel free to contact me!