Gone in less than a minute? That’s a problem that most web designers have to deal with. Most of their visitors click away from the website in a flash, literally within first few seconds. The present times are known for general people’s impatience. No one has got any spare time to wait. A second more for the website to load makes the user lose interest in it at all. Now you need to think of all the ways to get a visitor hooked and attracted to your website.

A great solution would be to have an eye-catchy component on the site that would instantly grab the attention of visitors. Such focal point would make your visitors want to stay longer on the site. However, it’s distinct and memorable. The focal points are created to hold on the attention of the user and the main concept that a web site is tailored to convey.

The fundamentals

If you place too many focal points on the site, they can spoil the entire web design. Too many cooks spoil the broth; that’s just the same as too many focal points spoil the design. Think of only one centre of attraction in your design. In practice it’s proved that having more than one centre of attraction is like having no focal point at all.

However, there’s nothing wrong in having two attention seeking points where one should have a call-to-action. And having those two attention points a designer has to make sure that they’re both well-distinguishable by a user. There are many many ways to differentiate them. The difference can lie in their position, colour, size, graphic and even text. But before you decide to allocate such attraction points on the design, ask somebody for an opinion.

Where to allocate the centre of attraction?

The most expected answer would be to allocate it on the homepage. And it’s probably the best page to get your visitor hooked. However, that’s exactly the mistake that a majority of web designers keep on doing when create a centre of attention on the landing page. As a rule, they miss out a very important point – every page should have a centre of attention. If you work with a non-scrollable page, you’ve got much more to experiment with. Make something simple look impressive and prominent.

The ways to create the attraction points

In the modern world with all available tools it won’t be a difficult task to get needed attention of your visitors. What’s important though is to be able to mix up the new and impressive elements together. Typography is one of the formulas that can help you to grab people’s attention. It’s beauty that attracts first. Of course, different font sizes can do a lot, but it is colour that actually grabs the visitor’s attention. A picture can speak a thousands words. It’s a well-known fact that people perceive graphical material far better than just a plain text. However, excess of everything is bad, the design has to remain beautiful. Buttons is another prominent and widely used graphic option that could become a great centre of attraction point because of its huge size and visible dominance.

It’s not such an easy job to create a good web design because it has to perform a lot of functions. A proper web design is supposed to be usable and nice-looking to capture the eye of a visitor. Besides, it has to deliver the required information and illustrate the brand of the company. The emergence of self-taught web designers implicitly leads to frequent changes in the web design concept. However, there are some essential principles that stay put. I will share with you some of my observations but yet, keep in mind that rules are created to be broken.

Precedence

A good web design is all about information and the best tool to highlight the important message on a site is precedence. On coming to a good web design, a user should be easily guided around the screen. Different parts of your web design are expected to have different visual weight. For example, logo is usually the first thing that catches the eye of a user. The reason for that is its distinctive location on a site (top-left) and obviously its size. And that’s a good thing because you want your users to know what site they’ve come to. But precedence is needed further on as well. You might want your visitors to go from one part of the site to another one in the sequence of importance. Thus, to achieve such precedence you can use the following design tools:

• position – an element which determines in which order a user is going to perceive the information;
• color – the choice of color basically draws people’s attention to the important bits of the content;
• size – surely, big elements attract more attention than little ones;
• design elements – if you place a huge exclamation sign on a web page or an arrow pointing at certain message, your users will definitely look in the right direction.

Spacing

Some web designers believe that it’s important to fill all the spacing on the site to leave no blank fields. But actually, that’s a bad practice. Spacing makes things much more coherent and lucid. There are three types of spacing used in web design:

• Line spacing. When you publish the content, spacing between the lines determines how readable the text would be. Too much as well as too little space can make the reading process a real daunting task. Therefore, it’s important to find the most suitable medium to provide website visitors with well-readable content.
• White space. White space is the term that refers to any empty space on the site. It is used to give the balance, contrast and proportion to the page. A lot of white space can make things look more elegant and prestigious on the site. Go through a magazine and pay attention to the way the ads are laid out there.
• Padding. Text shouldn’t touch other elements on the website. Here’s a very simple rule to follow – always leave space between text and the rest of the elements.

Navigation

One of the most frustrating practice is to come to the site and get disoriented as to where you are and where to go there. Website navigation can either make or break the site. The navigation  buttons should be prominent and well described so that a user can easily and comfortably navigate through the site.

The Usage of Enhanced Developments

HTML 5 and CSS 3 are not going to lose their popularity. These tools have been created to increase website visibility as well as quality of content presentation on the Internet. By using these tools you can add appeal to your website design. Enhanced word contours, shadowed borders and frilly imagery are the features that are not going to lose their topicality.

Flash

Despite all talking about disadvantages of Flash, it’s not going to lose its attractiveness. Flash-based websites can effectively display 3D animation and videos and thus, they won’t lose their popularity. Flash application help to create interesting designs to entice visitors to the site and look appealing.

Increased Responsiveness

The slow response of websites is a very frustrating thing. Customers expect instant and accurate solutions to all their queries on time and of high quality. For this reason web designers mainly focus on providing good responsiveness of web pages. The highlight of web design trends for this year are drop-down menus and pop-up windows. The growing popularity of smart phones, netbooks and other electronic devices has made webmasters focus on shrinking the information and graphic files so that they can be viewed in good quality.

Use of plug-ins and media approach

With the use of HTML5 access to many plug-ins has become available to the customers. The do-it-yourself approach is going to gain more and more popularity. People like to do things on their own without being dependent on professionals to sort all their tiny problems. Websites with demos won’t lose their charm. Internet users tend to visit such websites over and over again.

Web design and development is a constantly evolving industry. The growth and development of technologies always bring noticeable alterations to the trends and job description. So what is the future of web design industry? How will a web designer implement his work living a decade from now?

In this article we will try to look into the concept of web design and predict the future of a web designer a few years down the road.

Trends happen for a reason. Everything that exists in the present Internet world has started like a trend and grown into something bigger within some time-frame. Well-known social media networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter initially started off as a fun trend and it’s only after some time when they’ve gained enormous popularity and masses of followers all over the world. A few years ago social media networks didn’t have such powerful impact on people as they do now.

The bottom line is, it’s important to be aware of all the trends and if something new becomes popular, take it into account. Always ask yourself why a certain feature got so popular and trendy. There has to be a significant reason for its emergence in the design industry. Definitely, a certain novelty works for somebody. Be observant to the details and analyze the root causes. There’s always a possibility that one of the recent trends can become a basis for a new efficient technology.

So, shall we try to predict which design trends are going to stay for another several years with us? It’s quite understandable that only the most practical and useful trends are going to stick when some grow into echoes of the past.

Font replacement. This technology has just started to grow and yet even now it’s obvious, it’s only going to take off from here. As a matter of fact, it’s even surprising that this technology has started to evolve only in the last few years. It’s so much more efficient to replace web fonts with custom fonts when it comes to creating a branding style and a unique characteristic of the site. In the future web browsers will only evolve and expand their capabilities, giving more options to the web designers.

Personalization. With the growth of web industry, personalization has become an essential element of web design. In the future, this tendency is only going to become stronger. Web designers will have to spend more time thinking over the color schemes, imagery, layout and other designing elements to provide their projects with unique features and distinctive branding style.

A look of printed designs. There is a new tendency in the web industry that brings printed designs to life. In future, various textures will still be widely used with multiple backgrounds, 3D elements and paper-like objects.

There is absolutely no deficit of web designers these days, then the question is; why not to go for the first one who’s offering his services? Well, obviously, you can do that, though you need to realize that a basic website run by a few mouse clicks won’t make your business special. A website is a brand image of your company and therefore it should be professionally designed. You might not understand the whole potential of having a web resource, but let me just say, a website is the best mirror of your business on the Internet. There are certain factors which define professional website and for this reason it becomes necessary to enlist the help from an experienced web design company.

You should look for a company with an extended work experience in creating business website designs. Take a close look at the portfolio and check out whether it hasn’t got typical mistakes and pitfalls which could let your business reputation down in the worldnet. However, real experts with a decent training can manage and design your site in an effective way.

Whether you are a big corporate company or a middle-sized business, you should be looking into professional assistance to establish the desired reputation on the Internet. I’ve got the solutions for all possible requirements. I provide all service packages to hand you a website of your dreams. Custom services, wordpress/drupal installation and maintenance, website hosting, blog maintenance, SEO and marketing are the services provided at an affordable rate.

Regardless of the size, a website should have a nice and tidy look. Easy navigation, attractive and relevant color scheme, good graphics, images, high quality content, professional style of the font and layout are the elements required to make a professional and beautifully designed website. Having an interactive part on the site would facilitate communication between you and your clients and thus, you won’t face any difficulties with respect to the modifications and changes on the business site.