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Aesthetics for a Superior Website Design

Just as a coin has two sides, there are two complementary aspects in website design – Usability and Aesthetics. These two are equally important aspects needed to achieve a superior website design. Surely, a website with very good usability features is not enough, at least to attract and entice readers to visit your website and to retain readership.

Website aesthetics deals with ways on how to present your website, contents, and products to readers. Its purpose is to attract readers, retain readership, and to make your readers love your website. When usability appeals to the readers’ mind and technicality, aesthetics appeals to the emotion and soul of the readers.

Three Major Goals of Aesthetics

The first goal of website aesthetics is to create a very good impression on your readers. The website should, in the first few seconds, catch the attention of the reader.

Instill confidence and trust. Website aesthetics should be able to project a reliable and trustworthy image to the readers. When readers trust the website, they trust your products and contents.

Support your contents. Aesthetics should support the presentation of your contents and product. Everything should rhyme from contents to the last piece of pixel color in the website.

How to achieve these goals?

Frankly, these goals are difficult to achieve perfectly. However, with constant study and practice, it pays off with noticeable website improvement that translates to readership growth and perhaps financial gains. Here are some general tips recommended to achieve these goals.

Do research. Browse other websites and get ideas there. Please understand that getting ideas is not equivalent to copying other websites' designs. Sift through many ideas you can find that may be applicable to your website.

Identify the market. Be specific to the market you are targeting to tap. When you are selling products for women, your website should have a feminine look and fell. Same rules should apply to other target markets.

Be critical with colors. Selecting colors for the website is very important. Color effects have a great impact to website aesthetics and to the readers. Colors when used appropriately yields excellent results but when used wrongly, pronounce grave consequences. Here are some common color guides.

Color	Effect and Uses
Red	Promotes aggressiveness and energy; used commonly for sports and food related websites.
Blue	Promotes peace and masculinity; used commonly for relaxation, resorts, water, and men related websites.
Black	Promotes fear, evil, ghostly feeling; used commonly in extreme sports, rock music, conspiracy, mystical, and spiritual related websites.
White	Promotes simplicity and cleanliness; Used typically as template color and universally suitable for most website.
Green	Promotes fertility and health; used commonly in environment and health related websites.
Pink	Promotes feminine and fresh feeling; used commonly in women, children, and flower related websites.
Purple	Promotes intellectual and royal atmosphere; used mainly in scholarly, royal, and spiritual related websites.
Yellow	Promotes elegance and intellectual atmosphere; used commonly in jewelry, elite, and school related websites.

Be consistent. Consistency in the use of design patterns is highly recommended. Make it uniform to every page of your website as it promotes stability and trustworthy image to the readers.

Group and organize elements. Website elements should be grouped correctly to show harmony and balance across the website. Size and align elements of the pages to create a visually ordered set of elements.

Make use of images and photos. Visual communication is a highly effective way for communicating ideas and presenting products. Make sure photos and images to use are of high quality.

Page's layout should be concise and short. Short pages are preferable over long pages where readers need to scroll to see what’s hidden. Aside from the fact that short pages loads faster, it helps eradicate and filter unnecessary elements in the pages.

Test your website. Your web pages may appear differently or maybe distorted when viewed with different browsers. Testing your website to as many browsers as possible can help detect and fix these problems at an early time.

A superior website design is not achieved in an instant. Continuous experimentation and study are required to improve your website design.

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