Achieving Good Website Design

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with your library website overhaul and still haven’t started taking the online courses through the Build A Better Library Website Bootcamp…what are you waiting for?! The lessons are free to all New Jersey library employees and you can either take the course in full or focus on certain lessons that pertain to your needs.

The Build a Better Library Website Boot Camp is available through WebJunction’s course catalog for free to enrollees, including librarians and library workers, as well as museum and archive staff.

For example, if you’ve already gotten to know your website users, and better design is what your website is lacking, Lesson 3 of the bootcamp covers Visual Design Principles. In this post we offer a brief overview of what makes good website design (and what design mistakes to avoid), and you can refer back to the online course to dig deeper on the topic.

First it might be helpful to understand the elements and principles of design. Elements of design are the basic building blocks that make up a design and these include color, line, space, shape and form. A good starting point for your design elements is to work with the colors in your logo or branding and go from there. Repeating shapes on your website creates harmony, and line and space can be used to increase readability of the content of your website and allow users to concentrate on one piece of content at a time. Good form on a website is a design where everything on a page looks like it’s meant to go together.

There are specific principles of design that should be used as a guiding force behind the design of your website. Now let’s look at how we should use these principles to make an effective and visually pleasing website.

The main principles consist of simplicity, contrast, balance, pattern & repetition, emphasis, and unity. These concepts each have a purpose of keeping your design organized and providing a sense of harmony on the page. Only showing what’s essential, using variations of colors, shapes and fonts to make sections stand out, and creating a pattern with your layout all contribute to the rhythm and flow of your website. The goal when re-designing your website is to make sure all elements and all principles are optimally utilized.

Now that you have a breakdown of the basics of design, here are a few common mistakes to avoid.

• Blurry Images – Using original or stock photos that aren’t sized correctly or high- resolution could look unprofessional. Take the time to make sure photo file sizes are large and there is no pixilation when an image is clicked on or resized for your page.
• Fancy Fonts or Jarring Colors – It can be tempting to make sections visually pleasing through bold colors or funky fonts. Try to avoid this and keep it simple by using easy to read and appropriately sized text with neutral colors.
• Too Much Information – Negative space is your friend! This is the area that surrounds your photos and text on a page. Use background space to balance out your content and not overload users with too much information jammed together in one page.

Knowing what to focus on and what to avoid when it comes to design can help direct your redesign plan, but remember if you ever get stumped for ideas, check out what your fellow libraries are doing with their websites. Drawing inspiration of what looks good or what doesn’t look so good from other pages is the best way to figure out a plan of attack for your own digital design. Start browsing and spark some ideas to achieve good website design!