Improve your web site design using a few principles similar to those of lawn care.
Web site design is sort of like lawn care. If you want it to look professional, you need to hire — or be — a professional. But almost everyone can do the basics, enough to keep it from looking atrocious.
A beginning gardener should probably not raise orchids or bonsai unless specifically trained. A beginning web designer should not do forms, ecommerce, flash, forums, etc., unless trained either. Better to simplify the site or outsource those functions.
A rose garden in full bloom is stunning. A garden of roses, day lilies, hydrangea, ivy, boxwood, cactus, hosta, and marigolds would be painful to behold — if you could even get it to grow. Those plants have different sunlight, water, and soil acidity needs. They just don’t go together.
Likewise on each page of your site, carefully plan the content so that only compatible things are together. Unrelated paragraphs, graphics, links, and forms should go on other pages.
Tulips look best when planted en masse. An oak tree is at its most impressive when it stands alone in a large space. But a sickly oak doesn’t look good at all, and neither does a bed full of wilting tulips.
How much content should go on a web page also depends on what it is. For a directory of resources, more is better — as long as they are good! Bad links or poorly categorized items will turn off a visitor. With other types of content, such as home pages, it’s usually best to keep the content to a well-honed minimum. Either way, avoid useless language such as “welcome to…” or “click the links below to….”
Nothing screams do-it-yourself landscaping like one of those lawn signs of a lady in a dress bending over. Or a fake wishing well. Or a tree planted too close to a house or fence.
Signs of an amateur web designer are:
An impressive landscape uses similar materials throughout such as mulch or stone to give the entire property a cohesive look. The gardener may repeat colors, plant species, or bed shapes.
An impressive web site repeats elements such as fonts, colors, icons, and layout in whole or in part throughout the site to give it a branded look. Resist the temptation to try out every design technique you know within a single site.
That tree planted too close to the house will someday grow through the window. The path laid too narrow will be hard to walk on. Arrangements too far from each other give the impression of something missing. Those that are too close detract from the beauty of each.
Elements need the proper use of white space (or green space as the case may be) to be properly balanced. Proximity is proportional to relativity.
No yard will look good with a dead tree in the lawn or weeds in the flowerbed. No web site looks good with misspellings or grammatical errors in the text. A landscaper doesn’t leave an area empty with orange cones announcing “under construction.” Web designers shouldn’t do that either.
In many jurisdictions it’s not just tacky but illegal to let the grass grow too high. Although there's no law about keeping a web site current, if you let it stagnate it will eventually do you more harm than good. Even an archive should be checked periodically for working links and to ensure the look-and-feel matches the rest of the site.
Until and unless you decide to hire a pro to (re-)design your site, there are some things any dedicated site owner can do to improve a site’s design.