Navigating through Space

There's a lot of thought that needs to go into designing a web page. It's not good enough to just randomly select colors and images to compound your page. Research should be done into what is eye catching, visitor friendly, and what will return the profits you are looking for.

One overall important point is white space, also referred to as negative space. White space is a main ingredient in good website design. Its the term used to describe the open space found between designs. Located between letter, words, images,etc it is the key for providing healthy spatial relationships between the visual items on a page. White space helps to achieve design flow and balance in design. Many amateur designers erroneously think they must fill every space on the page. In web design less is more, being that simplicity and clarity lead to good design.

The focus is to keep the background areas where important information or products are presented a light pale, or white color. It helps to guide a browser's focus from one point to another. In the same vein, try to refrain from putting in background images. Besides for the inconvenience of pages loading much slower, its much less clear. Highlighted/colored text should also not be used so much, unless you're trying to emphasize important relevant information. With regard to the contrasting effect, make sure its a dark color , or you may run into the same problem.

Without enough white space, graphics may lose their emphasis, text is much harder to read, and the overall page may be difficult to comprehend. A visually appealing design must also be easy on the eyes. White space provides the much needed breather for the brain to process the information being viewed.

Designing a page with a white or gray scale backdrop leaves room to flash strong attention-drawing colors over it. The neutral base contrasts nicely to bring the focus where you want it to be. The design is a cleaner , more professional look. Leaving empty spaces can even be beneficial to the brand or service you are marketing. More white space may be viewed a s a higher class and can place your brand with a higher end market. Use your margins and place padding effectively. Give all your key elements like titles, headers, footers,etc a bit of padding so they don't crowd each other. Place margins between the various details on your page to separate between them. Padding is used more for spacing in a given element, while margins are used to separate between two or more elements.

Another key point in design is navigation. Navigation is the road map of your site. It the most important element in creating a readily accessible website. A website must be created in a way that it is easily navigable from any page on the site. Many times people will enter the site through pages other than the home and it must be easy for them to find their way around. It is necessary that the home page is reachable from any other page too. Having the major site sections easily attainable will ensure that a a visitor will see all or most of the available information.

Users expect good website navigation to consist of primary navigation, referring to the most important links, categories, etc. and secondary navigation which are secondary links, subcategories,etc. Positions of navigation , and the number of links per page are also top on the list of a visitor expecting website mobility.

When designing your website navigation try to figure in how to best help your browsers locate the information they are looking for in the quickest way possible. Try to minimize the amount of clicking they'll have to do to get to their results.

As with all web designing techniques, one needs to try to see what works best for them, though both of the above are generally across the board essentials. Good navigation is the key to successfully guiding visitors around your site, and of course white space doesn't have to be WHITE , but it does need to be SPACE!!