30 Days to Your First Website Design

• Less is More: Fundamentals of Minimalist Web Design

Hey guys – Welcome (back) to 30 Days to Your First Website Design, a Tuts+ premium course. I’m Ian Yates and today we’re going to continue with the theory section of this series by looking at Content. Let’s take a look at what we’ll be covering in this video.

What should we include?

This is another one of those lovely subjective questions – what we should or shouldn’t include is, of course, entirely down to the type of site we’re designing. A blog, a landing page, a portfolio, a webshop – they all need completely different types of content. There are however, common elements which we can usually apply across the board.

Firstly, arguably most importantly: Identity. From the moment someone enters your website, they should know who or what they’re dealing with – so make sure there’s at least some sort of a logo, or colors, or branding. Getfinch.com is a great example of how to do this without beating around the bush – no messing about.

A subtler, and more common approach, can be seen on the clearleft website. Logo top left (where the eye usually enters the screen – we’ll talk about this more later in the series) backed up by branding colors. Logos are often located top left, and they usually serve as links back to the homepage. These are conventions, aspects of web design which people have come to expect over time (and this is also something we’ll touch upon later in the series).

Next up, you’ll more often than not need to include primary navigation, and usually immediately visible somewhere above the fold (the are of a site visible without having to scroll). The website we’re going to be working on is going to be a corporate website. We’ll need to make sure that the brand is clear, that our contact information is readily available, and that our message is delivered. We can achieve that with strap-lines, mantras. Perhaps even testimonials from happy customers.

We’ll also have secondary content, which might not be in your face upon arriving, but can be found if needed. An “About Us” page, for example. In order to analyze specifically what we want to include, we’ll have to clarify our goals, and we’ll be looking at those during the next video.

What shouldn’t we include?

For now, let’s look a little more into what we shouldn’t include. Well, part of what we should have in our website is meaningful content. While the content itself may not be your responsibility (it will likely be down to a copywriter, or the client) you have responsibility to display it properly.

People (and that includes you!) tend to scan web pages, not read them from start to finish. What you should therefore avoid including is masses of unnecessary content. Keep body text to the point so that visitors aren’t turned off by huge paragraphs and long lines of text. If they’re looking for more detailed information, make it easy for them to go and find it.

Secondly, avoid anything which can be counted as visual noise. Anything which distracts the user from performing whatever action you expect of them. MrBottles.com is an extreme example here, visual noise can be as subtle as unnecessary images, or striking text on an advert.

Which leads me to my next point: ads. If a website is funded partially, or wholly through ad revenue, you’ll need to find somewhere for those ads to live. They need to be a valid part of the site, otherwise no-one will click them and they won’t generate any income! Make sure they don’t take precedence over the genuine content of the site.

Lastly (and this may sound obvious) don’t include anything for the sake of it. Don’t fill the footer with social links if the client doesn’t have any use for them, and don’t animate the logo just because you can.

Next Steps

OK, it’s time for some further reading. I want you to take a look at this article on minimalist web design by Curt Ziegler. In it he talks about removing clutter, which elaborates on what we just talked about with visual noise.

And as a little assignment, before you jump into the next video, I want you to think about a corporate website and ask yourself a couple of the following questions.

Next time on 30 Days to Your First Website Design, we’re going to look at goals. This is Ian Yates, and from all of us here at Tuts+, thanks for listening!