...

Web Design Talk And Thoughts

Stuff I like and keep in mind when designing and filling my webbed site(s).

Contrast and Text

Make it make sense. Red text, green background? Does that sound good to you? Of course not. However it's a design element that is commonly used, especially in old web design pages. Well, if you care about other people, stop doing this. Old sites can be designed in better ways than that. If your own eyes can't give you the answer, use a contrast checker to test if peoples eyes melt.

Huge text walls? try to make paragraphs. Don't seperate every two sentences, but make a break here and there, or if the topic slighly changes. Things are much more easy to read for your visitors too.

Don't color every sentence differently. Highlighting an important thing is toally cool, but don't do it with pretty much everything on your page. What you wanted to highlight just turned into something people will very likely overlook.

Fonts are cool. I love fonts! Heck I even made my own from my handwriting. Fonts rock! But that doesn't mean you should use 50 different ones on your site. Not only is this very bloaty, but it also hurts to read and your site might become unwatchable due to how confusing it is.

Graphics

Graphics are my favorite element on websites, my own included. But they can be overused, in good and in bad ways. You can add tons of images and decor which sill looks amazing, or it can turn into a mess very quickly. The main issue with that is inconsistency. Different styles in graphics and text. You got some gifs and pngs from a bunch of websites and now try to throw them together. In 9 cases out of 10, this won't work well. Either make your own graphics in a consistent style, or find graphics which look very similar to each other.

Welcome to my.. uh enter page?

You have probably seen it hundreds of times. Landingpages. A nice big graphic that screams "Enter" - but why? Well it's a door to your website, a floor before you come inside. And to me, it's one of those things I just can not like and skip fast. Generally, extra clicks to get to the actual content are bothering. That does not include content warnings. Those have a purpose and should be there! No, I am talking about empty "enter" sites and that is pretty much it. Especially on Neocites I really enjoy browsing and all I often see are thumbs of empty soulless enter sites, rather than an overview of the actual pretty index. Now these are only my two cents here and not a popular opinion... let's not be ridiculous. What you do and what not is still up to you.

Boxes

Some like them, some hate them. Some use them, others don't. Both is neither good nor bad. It's more about when they are needed. Do you like using cool backgrounds, lots of colors, images and pattern? Put your text and your content in boxes. Simply because it otherwise turns into an unreadable thing. If you have a colorful pattern background with text on top, you obviously can barely view or read any of it. No box fan? Use super gentle low opacity pattern, only single colors or gradients for backgrounds instead of heavy graphics!

Padding

Padding is the space around elements. There is almost nothing that hurts my soul more than 0 padding around any element on a page. Text, buttons, content, graphics, Titles...... . Elements need space around them to appear more clear. This is mostly important with text. Text shoudn't touch borders

... will add more if more comes to mind