How Can I Spruce Up My Site?
Ugly, of course, is a very subjective word. A site that one person might brag about, another might look at and say, "yuck!" On the internet, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and more often, in the eye of the creator. Bright green backgrounds with magenta text (flashing) might seem pretty nifty to one aspiring web designer, but it would quickly scare away anyone unlucky enough to stumble across the site. That's what we're all worried about here. We are trying to sell products on the web; we don't want to lose business because of our design.
As we will use it in this document, there are two kind of ugly: intentional ugly and accidental ugly. Intentional ugly is the green background thing that we spoke of earlier. It's the flashing text, looping, throbbing animated gifs, busy, bright, myriad frames, loud background phenomenon that often afflicts those new to web design. Most offenders would not be reading this document anyway, because part of the disease is that they think their sites look cool. The only advice I have here is, do you see C/Net, CNN, Time Online, Slate, Salon, or Wired doing it on their web site? These sites are trying to put forth a professional image. You should do the same.
For those in the second camp, the "I know my site doesn't look that great, but I'm at the end of my ability" crowd, here are some simple tips to clean up your site. The key is simplicity. These are general guidelines, and they are sure-fire ways to make a professional looking site. All these rules can be broken.
1. Don't use background patterns. Unless you have found a muted, smooth background that adds to your site, a background is usually just a distraction. Use white or a subtle, light color.
2. Don't use bright colored backgrounds. They hurt the eyes and make the background stand out more than the content of the page. To make a white background insert instructions in to the <body> tag: <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">.
3. Use black text. Colored text can look really good on some backgrounds, but there's always the danger that it will be too light to read, or too similar to the link colors to distinguish. If you color non-link text, people will try to click on the text and nothing will happen. (Remember that not all people view pages with links underlined. Also remember that not all monitors display colors the way you see them.
4. Make page margins. Using the <blockquote> tag at the very beginning of your document and the </blockquote> at the end, you easily make a clean margin on each side, like this page you're reading.
5. Use space efficiently. If you center lots of things on the page, you're liable to have lots of blank space on the page, which looks bad. Try to fill the page, leaving comfortable space between blocks of text and around graphics, but without a hodgepodge of blank areas without rhyme or reason.
6. Use high quality images or don't use any. If your graphics look bad, put some effort into learning how to make better images. Read some online documents to start. Consider hiring a professional to make you a logo, rather than trying to save money by doing it yourself. Fuzzy, blocky, blurry graphics put forth the image that you're ill prepared and don't have attention to detail. That's not the impression you want to give your customers. Clean text alone looks much better than bad graphics. Also, stock graphics rarely add anything positive to your site. You really don't need a little envelope icon for your email link.
7. Study and practice HTML to have more control. Even if you're a great artist, if you're not familiar with the tools you'll have a hard time producing something beautiful. Using different font sizes, tables, lists, image placement tags, and other formatting instructions can really make a difference, but it takes practice.
8. Copy people. People study at universities for many years to become designers. It's not easy, but you can teach yourself. A lot of browsing around and looking at people's HTML using the "view document source" feature on your browser can give you good ideas. Integrate other people's styles with your content. Most great artists started by copying other great artists.
9. Consider Hiring a Professinal. Read "Choosing Design Services."
