Part 1

What’s holding this thing together?
Developing the ability to see the underlying structure of a well designed web site can help you to create better web designs. It can also help you to understand the thinking behind why web sites are designed one way instead of another.

There are many factors to take into account when designing a web site. We’ll be looking at one factor; the layout; that is the glue that holds your site’s design together.

A solid underlying design is not only visually effective but it is also functional and supportive of its content. A good design feels right an seems to have everything in ‘the right spot’. The layout guides the user’s eye to the important bits of each page in an intuitive way.

I didn’t come here to Think!
People don’t want to think about where things might be on a page, they just want to find them fast and make use of them. Good layout will do this.

Learning how even the most complex layout can be broken down into simple shapes will let you build a visual library of layouts to draw from.

Grids are one way to build a site. They can be a very effective design tool but they’re only one of many ways to work. For example, accidental design is one other method conceived by the dada movement in 1916.

What to look for.
When I look at a web design I first look at how the main parts fit together, there size and where they are positioned on the page. On some sites you can see this almost instantly, but you still need to know what to look for.

The more simple the layout the better, but simple is not always easy to do.

The main parts of most sites are the header, the navigation and the content. More involved web sites have more parts such as ads, sub navigation, user login, user input areas such as mailing lists, surveys or polls and multiple types of content such as images, videos and audio.

White space or negative space is another element every site should include to keep your pages balanced, fresh, inviting and uncluttered. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Each site is different in its complexities or lack thereof. As I mentioned, simple is better. Taking the time to layout all the pieces of your site in an attractive, organized, functional design can make your site more useable for your users.

Coming in Part 2
We’ll see how all this works in the real world. We’ll take a look at some web sites and break them down into their simplest layouts to show you how a designer sees a web page.

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