As I promised, in this article I will discuss what makes a good web design. What I am about to say is the bare essentials in making a good web design and by no means will I touch on the type of graphics, color and other subjective elements that will be perceived differently by different eyes. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what looks good to me might look awful to another. However, eye candy aside, there are still important elements that can make or break a website, mainly it's the usability, layout/structure and graphics of a site that determines whether the design is good or not.

The first rule of a good web design is to make it dummy proof, which means, don't make your users think about how to use your site. Navigational links should be clear, prominent and use clear/direct labels, to ensure the user understands what are his options at first glance. I've just encountered a site so horribly laid out, and the links were using labels only people working in the organization would understand, as thus it took me quite some time before I could find the correct link to get to the login page to check my student loan statement. Really frustrating. Back on track, the layout of your site should be properly structured, displaying your most important content prominently, but don't provide too much content on a single page that it causes your site to seem cluttered. This will only serve to confuse your users and make content hard to find, in the worse case it causes information overflow, frustrates the user and causes the user to leave your site. In this case more is not necessarily always better.

Look at magazines and other print media such as newspapers, especially newspapers, which normally has lots of content on a single page, from stories to ads. Notice how the content is laid out, and how headlines are used to attract your attention to the most important stories. A webpage is similar in this case, you have multiple content on a page, maybe throw in a few ads here and there, some graphics to make the page more interesting to look at, and you've got yourself a webpage. Now try laying out all these elements effectively on a page, easier said than done right? There's a lot to talk about laying out a webpage, and so I'll leave it to a later article, this one is to provide an overview of the elements that make a good web design, after you've got this down then we'll move on to the specifics.

Ok, so far we've got two elements down, usability, and page layout. The next element would be the eye candy graphics. I'm sure some of you would be asking, isn't the content more important? No doubt, the content is the most important element of a website, but in this article, we're talking about Web Design, assuming you have uber content but just do not know how to lay it out nicely on a page. So I'll leave content out for now. Graphics are the element that spice up a page, they serve more of a decorative purpose but can serve as an enhancement to the overall web experience if used properly. For instance, the clever use of icons accompanied by clear labels will further enhance the user's understanding of how to use your website.

An example of icons accompanied with clear and understandable labels

Now the use of graphics is undoubtly going to make your site look jazzy, and eye catching, but be aware that the more graphics you use, the slower your site will load, especially if the graphics are not optimized and have huge file sizes. This leaves a bad impression on users, as people have short attention spans and will leave your site without a second thought should it take more than 30 seconds to load. If you really can't afford to make your site load fully in 30 seconds, the least you could do is make part if not most of your content load first, this will at least give users something to look at while your pretty eye candy graphics are loading.

Remember, graphics serve as a visual enhancement and is not the most attention grabbing element on your web page, I've read some research papers saying that users are attracted more towards text and headlines more than the graphics on a webpage, the reason? We're so used to scanning newspapers and other printed media for headlines and content, take note of what you notice first the next time you read the newspaper, is it the text or the graphics? Being a graphical person, and I'm sure a lot of you would disagree with what I've just said, no doubt we will notice graphics, but only if it is a very interesting image, as I found out, most other times when I'm scanning for content, my eyes are attracted more to the headlines rather than the images. Try it for yourself, that's the best way to determine whether this is fact or just research fabricated.

Now I'm going to sum it all up, a good website needs to have good usability, making the website easy to use and navigate. It also needs to be properly laid out, allowing content to be easily found and accessed yet making it look clean and uncluttered. Lastly the clever use of graphics to further enhance the experience without slowing down the loading time of the site. I hope this article was useful and informative for you, and most of all hoped you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I will go into further detail about usability, layout/structure and graphics in later articles.