Simple Website Design – All You Need Are These Four Elements

With all the tools available today for sprucing up your website, the good news is that you don’t need most of them. A simple website design is always preferable to an overloaded web site with flashing text and images everywhere.

So the first rule in keeping your web site design simple and basic is this: decide what you want your visitors to do when they arrive on your page. If it’s a personal website and you want visitors to sign up for your mailing list so you can tell them about your upcoming events and activities, then you want to highlight your opt-in box. If the web page is going to be optimized to earn Google AdSense income, then you want to make sure your visitors are presented with Google ads right upfront and as often as permissible by Google throughout the page.

So before you do anything else, decide what you want your visitors to do when they land on your page.

The next step is to choose colors for your site. I like to use Color Scheme Generator, a free online program that will give you a quick, graphic view of complementary colors that work well for website building. Do a Google search and it should come right up for you. Have fun trying the different combinations until you discover a set colors that are appropriate for your theme and inspire you.

That said, the primary focus of most webpages is the content. People are online looking for information. Whether it be in the form of articles or videos or audios, they’re seeking to learn something new. So with your simple website design, you want to highlight and build around your content.

Generally, your content area should be near the top of the page and on the left side, since this is where your visitors will look first. Keep a white background and use black text in an Arial font whenever possible. Frame the area with a graphic header that complements the theme of your web site, incorporates the color scheme you selected, and contains the website name. If your content is lengthy, break it up by adding an image somewhere around the mid-point.

To the right of your primary content area, add a navigation bar that will lead your visitors to the other pages on your website.

Beneath your content area, include a footer that reflects the colors and theme of the header.

All four of these elements can be easily integrated into a table with three rows and two columns. The header goes into the top row, the footer in the bottom row. The middle row will contain two columns, one for your content (approximately 80% of the width) and one for your navigation menu (approximately 20% of the width). That’s it. You’ve got yourself a very simple website design that shouldn’t take you more than half-an-hour to put together.