How people react to your website relies heavily on how it looks and feels, the interface and how the user interact with the webpage are fundamental aspects of the webpage itself and can make or break a website. Here we’ll be talking about how to make your webpage look and feel nice, friendly and interesting to newcomers. Animations, color choice, shape choice and a plethora of other concepts will be gone over in detail and their contribution to the overall feel, look and usability of the website will be examined.

Aesthetics

I’ve already mentioned this but I think I’ll say it again, just for emphasis: how good your webpage looks is one of the most important factors of your website. If your website looks like not a lot of effort has been put into how it looks, people will assume that not a lot of effort was put into the site itself. You can also use this to your advantage by luring people in with how good your site looks, distracting them from less-than-perfect content.

• Animations – Having your cursor turn into a hand when it goes over a link isn’t going to cut it for your animations. Whenever the cursor is moved over or clicks on any part of the site, a cool yet short animation should occur. Long animations are too boring and will have users becoming annoyed with waiting for your animations to cease, but a quick and nice transition can go a long way
• Shape – Websites that look too geometric are bound to fail. It may not seem like much, but rounded corners go a long way. Try ellipses and circles over squares and rectangles, but don’t use them too liberally, or your site will look too strange and cluttered, rectangles are a lot more neat and look more professional as well.
• Color – Bright colors like cyan, sky blue and pale green are pleasing to the eye and will make your page look immeasurably better than just white, gray and black. Try different colors that go well together for different parts of your website, having only one color over and over again gets boring and repetitive.

 

 Usability/Interface

Definitely the most underrated aspect of the design of a website itself, how the user interacts with the website is fundamental to its success. A website being too difficult to use might cause a user to leave and find a new website to visit. Make things change color when moused over, making sure users know where their mouse is and what will happen if they were to click. Also try  making different categories of elements of the page look fundamentally different, whether that’s the color of them, their shape or whatever defining characteristic they happen to have. Usability is an increibly big part of how a website functions and how the user interacts with it.

Often, sites get too caught up in one part of their website and think that nothing else matters, which, usually, will eventually lead to their demise, but many different elements working well together is what really makes a webpage interesting and viable. A nice interface leading to high quality content in an organized and easy fashion is the secret to designing a good website.