Once you have planned thoroughly your web site and prepared tons of great content to offer your visitors, it's time to materialize all that in a well-structured, professional-looking design.

WHAT IS A GOOD WEB DESIGN?

It's difficult to arrive to a definition of good web design. Depending on the type of site and your goals, some elements will be of more importance than others. In any case, and generally speaking, a good web design must:

• Help visitors find the information they need: The first thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that web design covers not only visual elements (color schemes, tipography, graphics...) but also wider concepts like:
  • Internal structure: How the information of a web site is distributed in different web pages.

  • External structure: How different parts of information are distributed within the same web page.

  • Usability: The ease with which a user can realize those internal and external structures and access quickly to the relevant information. This relates to how information is distributed, but also to how easily readable it is.

  The points above are essential and need to be thought about carefully before any graphic design starts. Otherwise, your site will be useless for your visitors, regardless how nice-looking it is.

• Look professional: One of the most important feelings your web site must inspire to your users is trust. The trust is established mainly by two factors: the confidence in your content (the product you sell, the information you provide...) and the general look of your site. A clean, careful, professional design will improve the credibility of your web site.

• Be adequate for your users: Not all the users are the same. According to age, sex, socioeconomic group, hobbies and other factors their tastes will vary. You need to adapt your site to those tastes, so it will be more appealing to your visitors. Obviously a site targeted to teenagers can't be similar to one targeted to marketing experts.

• Be adequate for you: Your site represents you (or your company). Be sure that the look of your site suits the image you are trying to project. An inappropriate web site can ruin all you efforts towards building a corporate image.

• Download fast: Even with today's faster connections, it is important that your site loads quickly. It will improve the users experience and your site's perception. Remove redundant code, use style sheets (CSS), avoid tables, optimize graphics...

• Be easily modifiable: Your site should be easy to maintain and update, and ready for future growth. A well structured code and external CSS files will be of help on this matter.

ASPECTS TO BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION

Web design is not a stand-alone activity and should be seen as complementary and intrinsically connected to other fields of the web development:

• Usability: As commented before. Design elements can't be an impediment for users to find quickly what they need.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Any web design must be search engine optimization ready in order to avoid future problems in this area. It's not that web designers should be SEO experts, but at least they should know how search engines work. Indexable urls and proper link structures are vital to facilitate the SEO work.

• Marketing and sales: This is important specially (but not only) for selling sites (e-commerce). An integrated marketing campaign will make your design an effective goal-achieving platform.