Thought's, Musing and What's New at Pixelgems

Essential Elements in Web Design

Posted 2009-05-22 by Karl Geng

A professionally designed web site is built on several well established fundamentals. There are essentially four basic principles to successful web design.

The principles are:
- Efficient page construction
- Ease of Use
- Visual Impact
- Page Content

At PixelGems, we know and understand all of these principles.

Efficient page construction
Let's face it; the days of "build it and they will come" are long over. With thousands of new sites appearing each month, it's growing increasingly more difficult to get noticed. That's why you need to have effective page construction to allow search engines to easily crawl and index your page content. Many of the web design tools that are available today make the task of creating a decent fairly simple website. However, with this ease of creation comes unwanted bloated web code which hurts your website by making search engines have to crawl through unnecessary junk instead of directly getting to the content that matters. Every additional line of unnecessary code is wasting space and taking away from your content.

We build effective code. We hand code every line and only include what is required to make the web page come to life, not any of the extra junk that many do-it-yourself pagemakers put in. This ensures that there is room for what's most important, which is your business' product or services.

Ease of Use
In order to be effective, a website needs to be easy to use, simple intuitive navigation and the information presented in logical organized fashion. Web site users are very impatient, and if they cannot find what they are looking for in short order, they move on. We do this by providing multiple search methods and tools, simple consistent navigation principles and logical page flow structure.

Visual Impact
A website should look clean and simple, uncluttered and create a visually pleasing balance to the web user. Colours and design elements must blend well and complement each other. The importance of colour selection is often overlooked, but is a very important factor in creating a mood, feeling of confidence and trust for the web users. PixelGems considers all of the factors in design, everything from colours to font selection to create the perfect design for each client.

Page Content
It is often said, "Content is King" and nothing could be more true. You must provide your web user with quality, relevant content; this ensures that users will come back again and again. Good content establishes trust for the search engines as well. If someone searches for a certain phrase, and they discover the content they are seeking on your site it increases your ranking and credibility with the search engines. This is why we often include News and Blogs systems on many of our sites. As well as integrating our SiteData CMS systems on your site, you can easily maintain page content yourself and keep your web site always relevant. Frequent updates will also increase search engine rankings, making it incredibly important. If each time a search engine comes back to crawl your site they find something new, they will increase the frequency they visit and this boosts your rankings as well.