Consistency
In this final post of our series on Guidelines for Good Web Design, we’re wrapping it up with the element that ties all of the other pieces together – consistency.
Consistency is critical to good web design to ensure everything matches. Heading sizes, fonts, colors, spacing, navigation, etc. Good web design should be consistently themed to be coherent from one page to the next and within a single page. Consistency is the most important factor that separates websites that are taken seriously and those that are not. Therefore, if you’re in the business of selling online, consistency in your design should be at the top of your priority list.
Consistency in your site design is about being professional. Inconsistencies in your web design are like spelling mistakes – they lower the perception of your professionalism. Whether your design is simple or complex, keeping it consistent will make it appear more professional and trustworthy in the eyes of your visitors.
The simplest way to produce a consistent web design is to do a lot of thinking and second guessing about how your visitors will use your site before it is ever taken live. Also, having good CSS stylesheets can be of a tremendous help in ensuring a consistent and visually appealing design.
Putting it All Together
As previously posted, the Guidelines for Good Web Site Design include the following elements:
- Design for Scanning – Your site should be easy for your visitors to scan to find the information they’re looking for.
- White Space – Effective use of white space makes your design look cleaner and helps to keep visitors on the path you want them to take with less distractions.
- Site Navigation – Your site navigation should be obvious and provide your visitors with a clear sense of where they are on your site.
- Design to Build – Out of this world web design is great, so long as it isn’t complex to the point of being a barrier to building your site.
- Text and Formatting – The text you choose for your web site is among the most important design elements you need to consider. Put serious thought into fonts, text colors, font sizes, spacing, etc.
- Usability – Think about who will be visiting your site, what they want, and what you want them to do. If your site is challenged from a usability perspective – it will also be challenged in creating significant conversion rates.
- Alignment – Think of the alignment of a site’s design as a grid, with everything fitting squarely in place. The effective use of alignment can also have a positive effect on your conversion rates.
- Crisp and Sharp Design – Think at the pixel level like a professional web designer would to ensure your design elements look as crisp and professional as possible. Fuzzy graphics, or poorly done text as images, only take away from the professionalism and trustworthiness of your site.
- Consistency – As addressed in this post. Consistency can be considered as the glue that binds. Regardless of the elements you chose for your site design, consistency is among the most critical.
Click on any of the above links to read the previous posts in this series.
Awesome post. You have made some fantastic points and I couldn’t agree more. It is refreshing to see something that encompasses all the major areas like this. I will be sure to send others to this post as it is very informative. Keep up the great work!
Terrific stack of articles, it’s nice to see a summary that covers most of the important elements on website design.
The only thing missing is building a site that’s user friendly for search engines as well as humans.
Without the mostly free traffic from google & yahoo, most sites will never really become successful, so it’s important to keep SEO in mind when planing and building sites.
People always trust things that they know very well and the consistency in web design can enable to build trust as well as it makes business sense and helps to increase your returns by increasing customers. One needs to have use the same business name, logo, and/or logotype for building consistency in web design…