Design Ideas

Web Design Ideas

Web and Graphic Design Ideas, Tips and Inspiration

From our 10+ years in building websites we bring you some useful ideas and tips for designing effective and high quality websites.

Website Design Ideas

If you are a beginner-to-intermediate level designer we recommend you read our articles on Design Concepts and Web Design Basics first.

Getting the bigger picture - The idea behind website design

Its extremely important to be fully aware of the ultimate goals to be achieved via your created site design. Without hindering a website's usability (simple and quick access to information, services or products), a web designer's ultimate aim for a website's design is to reach the optimal balance between its attractiveness (targeted look-and-feel with necessary design effects), load time considerations (optimizing design elements for reasonable web page size) and user friendliness (easy-to-use navigation and user interactions plus well laid-out easily readable content) - without entirely compromising on either of them. On the programming front, no compromise must be made in building a well coded and error free website that ensures a uniform user experience - web standards compliant (W3C valid XHTML/HTML and CSS), accessible and cross browser compatible.

Using the correct effects for an Impressive & Effective Website

Some design elements greatly enhance the look and user experience of your web site and create a positive first impression. Some of these effects are:

Clean and simple CSS Effects
Lightweight Javascript or JQuery Effects
Graphic and Photo Effects
Website Interactivity via visually appealing applications

More Info? Read our detailed Web Design Ideas article.

Website Design Tips

Design Tips to build an Effective Website

Give Priority to the Website User's Needs design for the users of the website and see things from a visitor's perspective while designing.
1. Use Clear, Maintainable and Easy Navigation so the website is easy to use for both the visitor and webmaster.
2. Clean and Consistent Layout Design with lots of white space for readability.
3. Design for all Screen Resolutions - Design your website in such a way that it looks inviting to everyone.
4. Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility - Design your website in such a way that it is usable by everyone.
Program using pure CSS for optimum accessibility and reusability. CSS considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website.
Optimize Load Time: Make sure your load time is low and test for your website's performance often. For this you must:
1. Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
2. Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
3. Use Server Side Include (SSI) files wherever possible. Includes once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.
4. Use Server and Client caching of your web page static content (Images, JS, CSS and HTML files).
5. Set Expires Header - The optimal expiry time for your static content is 'more than 7 days'.
6. Minify CSS and JS code - remove all spaces, comments and line breaks from your CSS and javascript files.
Ensure a Scalable and Reliable Website - Get a reliable web host and make sure the website design allows for future enhancements.
Test Early Test Often (TETO)

More Info? Read our detailed Web Design Tips article.

Graphic Design Ideas

Website Graphic Design Ideas for Fireworks

Using Fireworks you can create many unique graphics for both print and web design. The latest versions of Fireworks, Adobe Fireworks CS4+ are va-va-voom! Read about some of these cool features introduced in CS4. Be sure to check out our new Fireworks Tutorials on website graphic design. Some of these new tutorials are listed below:

More Info? Read our detailed Graphic Design Ideas article.

Design Inspiration

No matter how experienced you get in web design, when it comes to creating a new and more novel design than your previous, every designer looks for inspiration - consciously or unconsciously - be it from the real world around us (from nature or objects), other talented designers or from other visual media. As our eyes go about doing this job, all we need is a developed knack for, learning from and building on every tiny idea, to, assimilating them in creating a new original design.

In the next couple of weeks we will be publishing our list of inspirational website designs - overall and for specific elements. Displayed below are a few design ideas for inspiration to get your creative juices flowing. Please feel free to suggest web sites whose overall look or particular design elements are impressive so we can include them (with credits to the designer if known).