Website Design Guidebook, Volume 1

Size is only half of good web typography. The typeface you choose shapes how your whole site feels, and how long people are willing to keep reading. Readability comes first. Some fonts are lovely in a logo but tiring over a full page. Reading an entire website set in...

Some years ago, we worked with a client whose website was in good shape. It was well optimized for search, with solid, useful text on the homepage. Then their sales slowed, and they hired a new sales executive. He was convinced that his customers didn't read at all....

Homepage sliders, also called carousels or slideshows, are among the most popular website features. Many website themes include them by default. But sliders aren't right for every website, and they should be used with care. Here are the most common problems. They slow...

After two posts on the problems with sliders, you might think I never use them. Not true. There's a time, a place, and a situation for everything, and we've used sliders often over the years. The key is that they have to be done right. A slider that works. One good...

How do you make the top of your homepage stand out the right way, and lead visitors to find out more? The blocks of information you need aren't complicated. The real challenge is arranging them so the page flows naturally for the eye. With modern website tools, the...

When researchers moved from newspapers to websites, they expected readers to behave the same way. They didn't. Headlines before photos. Poynter's EyeTrack studies of online reading, beginning around 2000, found that many web readers were drawn first to dominant...

In 2006, the Nielsen Norman Group recorded the eye movements of 232 people as they looked at thousands of web pages. When the researchers combined the results into heat maps, a clear shape appeared. If you squint at those maps, you can almost make out the letter F....

What Does Your Homepage Need to Do? There's no one-size-fits-all homepage. The right layout depends on your business, your audience, and what you want visitors to do. Here are the most common layout styles, several of which we'll explore in more depth later in this...

The Trouble with "Pretty Photo" Homepages Many website themes today lean toward full-screen, minimal design. You land on a large, beautiful photo with a few words of text and a button, designed to make you click. But how strong does that combination have to be to...

The Ideal Size of Everything Online So far in this series we've talked a lot about layout, eye tracking, and how people read. Now let's turn to design itself, starting with the size of things. Web design is all about communication. The designer's role is to balance...