Web designers and web developers often wonder what kind of things they should do so that their audience will love them. In this section we will talk about those little things that create a big impact on people throughout the internet.
Good Navigation
A good web designer understands that visiting a new website may be confusing at first, because it’s a new layout and the new visitor will not automatically know where to find things. The same is true when you visit a new friend’s home, you don’t know initially where the john is or where to sit and relax.
A good web designer is a good host to his guests, that’s why they will need to guide the visitors’ eyes like they are giving a tutorial on how to use the website, only it is actually without telling them. It’s the mark of a good web designer to place elements where the visitors will expect them to be, or create an attention getter. For example, the Login and Register links are usually at the top right corner of the website, below it is the search function. An example of a good attention getter are Call-to-action buttons which tells the visitor/audience what the button is about.
Familiar Setting
While it is perfectly normal to experiment and show the world your creation, it is not really a good thing especially if you are aiming for mainstream. Take for example websites with vertical navigation. There hare websites that hit the correct spot, but such a design is not really accepted widely.
A good web designer knows when to provide their audience new things, such as art-directed designs for blog posts. They also understand that, while unique is good, it will be bad to deviate too much from the accepted standards.
Key elements such as the navigation should be placed where the visitor will expect it to be.
Flexible Design
This might be the hardest and most stressful part of designing, making sure that your design is not messed up on different browsers and machines. One problem about new designers is that they tend to not take notice of the fonts they use, if the other users have it or not, or if it runs on a Mac and others.
Since we all have our preference with internet browsers, it is the duty of web designers to make sure that their design appear correct on my Chrome, on your Firefox, and on old Nan’s IE6.