15. Looking good tonight!
Both text and images are important in getting your message across – but so is their layout. Here are some tips to avoid a tip.
Remember, subtlety is the best way into a woman’s/man’s (delete as appropriate) heart and a customer’s wallet…
Creating The Look
It is the whole composition of the site that will etch itself into the mind of your users. No matter how well written your text is and no matter how eye-catching your images, if the content is presented badly it will fail to impress and will dilute the quality of your offering. In much the same way as a good painting requires a good mount and frame, a good web site must have a pleasing background, make good use of colour and be displayed in a professional font. Get all of this right and it will add value to your site, regardless of the quality of the content.
Choose Your Font, Sir
We all have a font that we are fond of. However, many fonts that look great on the printed page look dreadful on the screen. Prepare to compromise with your developers. A good font is only good if it is legible. Make your suggestions and let them make theirs – look at actual web pages on a monitor to make your decision, not a print out (and only then overrule them!).
Just A Hint Of Apple
Personally I would recommend using primary colours only when you have to. Just as having too much on a page is noisy, primary colours are very loud; many users see primary colours as an admission of failure – the content isn’t very good, but if I shout it out something might stick. Time to pretend you are painting the kitchen and use some Pantone cards to decide on which slightly off-cream background you are going to use. Remember, primary bad, pastels good.
Clickable Icons
As well as using colour to highlight that a link is indeed a link to another web page or web site, there are many typographical ways to enhance or reinforce the clickability of a certain word. The obvious and most popular solution is to highlight links in bold. Or you can increase the font size. Some web sites make their links italic, but I feel that this makes the word harder to read on the screen. What is only beginning to be used to great effect is to change the font of a link to help draw attention to the fact that you can click and go.
Shhh! This Is A Library, Not A Monkey House
It is of paramount importance to keep noise to an absolute minimum. One of the pitfalls of having multiple product managers all fighting for their product or service to be highlighted on the homepage is compromise. If you are ultimately responsible for what is loaded onto your homepage, give no quarter. If the limit is four products, or six news articles or whatever, stick to it and enforce some sort of rotation schedule. Compromise is disastrous. Letting everyone have a little bit of the page means confusion, noise and a murky picture for the user. A busy homepage does not mean that everything gets a fair share of the user’s time and interest – everything loses out, as a messy page suggests a messy company. Be strict, be fair and wear a crash helmet.
How did it go?
Q. We are limited in the colours we can use on the web site because our brand was created long before the internet ever existed. We simply can’t change our colours now. Will this mean our web site will fail?
A. Granted the logo might have to remain the same, but the internet is a discrete medium and therefore different rules apply. Your customers will still trust you if your site is built with a different look and feel to your printed material – in fact, they would much rather it was legible and pleasing to the eye than confused and fussy just because you insist on yellow text on an orange background.
Q. How will we know which colours work best for us? Our developers usually deal with those sorts of decisions. Should we be dictating to them?
A. If you are paying for the project, then it is your decision, not theirs. They might have their preferences and suggestions – listen to them, they will probably be right – but also ask for the site in a number of formats. Insist on a selection of fonts and colours to choose from.
Here is an idea for you…
On a staging or development server, take a couple of your web pages, choose a couple of colours that you don’t currently use as well as some random colours you wouldn’t ordinarily think of using in a million years and let your techies run riot. Ask them to be as zany and creative as they can and see what happens.
The end product will be a little bit scary and little bit different, but just look how a couple of colour changes alters the entire feel of a web site. It may not lead to finding a better composition than you have now, but it’s a quick and easy way to find out if you can improve your look. And it might just go great in the spare bedroom.
Defining idea…
‘Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.’
Blaise Pascal
Defining idea…
‘Art is science made clear.’
Jean Cocteau