Build beautiful websites even if you don't know design

Hello webmasters,

Today I have written a very informative post about web developers who struggle to build beautiful websites. I use to struggle but after I learned these concepts my designs got better a lot. Hope you find it useful ...

http://www.farrisfahad.com/post/how-to-design-a-beautiful-website-as-a-web-developer

 

Thank you for the article Farris! I'll enjoy reading it later. Added it to my bookmarks.

 

Thank you for reading it

 

With due respect, I disagree.

First, post consists of three generic and vague statements, without any details, reader's engagement or source citation.

Second, those statements are highly subjective. Who is the one decide which color, or font size combination, or margin/padding looks ugly, and which one looks professional? It's not sufficient you say that you think it looks ugly.

And third, your analysis lacks any depth, you just took three random page elements, and you discuss them without any considerations for the rest of the page.

In first example, two shades of red, it makes no sense to discuss it without knowing font colour, logo colour, and overall composition of the page. Both colours will look ugly with wrong choice of font colour, or with overall palette of the site, which usually consists of 4 to 5 colours; comparing just two random colours doesn't provide much value, except that we now know you don't like bright red colour.

In second example, text that you say is 'professional and beautiful' has weird alignment, it is scattered left and right, so it will look nice only if it somehow merges with rest of the page and with background shapes; otherwise, on this white background and without any graphics, to me it looks ugly, it is worse than first option - first option shows order, left aligned, slogan in first line, link in second line, all of them easily readable... Why does it 'look ugly and confusing', I don't get it?! Second option is more confusing to me!

And in third example, my impression is just the opposite from yours - giant button with small, barely readable text in the middle, looks terribly outdated; but the first button is just as bad - buttons looked like this fifteen years ago. Though, if some clever designer can fit it nicely into the rest of the page, both buttons could pass the test of today. Once again, you cannot discuss 0.2% of page content without knowing remaining 99.8%.

So, my friend, I'm afraid your examples are just personal thoughts, which is fine, but I fail to see some actual use of your article for a developer.

 

Thank you for your honest feed back. I know I am not a good writer but I am trying hard to produce a good article. I think I need to rewrite it.

 

Hi. I just updated the article. I did the best I can. Can you take a look and see if you find it better and useful now?

Thanks

 

I'd have a hard time calling that an "article". Too short, utterly devoid of details and filled to the brim with little more than glittering generalities. All you've managed to do is take three or four paragraphs worth of text that doesn't actually say much of anything of value, and slop in a ton of double breaks at the end of every sentence to pad it to four screen-heights at 1440p like a 5th grader trying to pad their essay question.

No offense, but bottom line that's not an article, and even if it were it really doesn't seem to say anything.

 

Thanks for taking seriously my comments, I didn't expect it! It seems you have just started with that blog, only three articles, so of course it takes time to create better content. You may know how to design nice site, but you might not know how to describe it in an article.

I reacted solely because your initial post above said that article is "a very informative post"; it is exaggeration; unfortunatelly, and I see deathshadow has the same opinion, it is post, but it is not really informative, let alone very informative. However, your reply above is much more realistic, you accept that article is not really good, so you just need to practice.

Personally, I wouldn't have any patience to write such an articles, but if you want to dabble with further development of your blog, my opinion is that improvement of web design is so vast topic that in no way it can be covered in one article. You may write one separate article for each of the topics you mentioned:

Colours - go on to present that site you mentioned (you had link in first version, but it seems to be removed now), describe various colour palletes and their application (for example, business sites usually use blue palletes, gaming sites use palletes with high contrast, red-black-white, or so, sites who target women use mild rose-pink-red palletes, etc., I don't know, I'm guessing now.

Fonts - importance of readibility, hence proper contrast with background, usually sans-serif fonts for web, avoiding fancy fonts that make reading difficult, etc.

Buttons - integration of buttons with rest of the content, so they don't look strange, what is better, button or image or simple text link; feedback effect - change of colour or shape when mouse hover and when clicked, so user know that click was successfull, etc.

Graphics - avoiding too much use of stock images, avoiding hotlinked images, as source image may change, so your site remains with compromised images and you may not know it, compres images so they load as fast as possible, use proper alt tags, etc.

And again etc. etc. - there are countless topics to write about; however, you should consider what do you want to accomplish with your blog; I wouldn't want to discourage you, but competition is fierce nowadays. Blogging is saturated as numerous CMS, lead by Wordpress, enabled each average Joe to easily create and update his blog. So, if you write this blog as means of relaxation and contemplation in spare time, instead of watching TV or playing some video game, then yes, go for it, and your articles will become better and better as the time goes. But if you write the blog at the expense of your working time and you feel it takes too much efforts, but you want to do it hoping that blog will be highly successfull one day, chances that your blog ends at first page of Google search are slim, so you should evaluate whether that time and efforts could be better invested.

Good luck with your endeavour anyway!