Starting
If I start designing a website for a client that is not sure of how they want the end result to look or what is needed in the design, it’s hard. To pull a worthwhile design out of thin air, without any guide to what the client needs or would like, is a long shot. It is key to get some sort of idea of what the design needs, even if the details are scarce they should help you a lot along the way, such as whether the client needs a one, two or three column design.

Creativity
The simple fact that you now know how to space everything goes a long way in planning out a design. If the client can refer you to website he or she likes and feels would work for their purpose that helps a lot as well, but remember it is key, not to copy the website. You need to be creative and make sure you develop your own personal style.

Color
Now, in order to produce and effective design you need to know a few basics when it comes to choosing colors, try not to only use one color (other than shades, such as black and white). If a person has a design where they choose to use a single color, your visitors will quickly be turned off and will choose not to browse around. To avoid this you need to choose a complimentary color, it doesn’t have to be a total opposite but it needs to give contrast to the template.

For example, Lifespy.com uses a green color for the main feature. They get away with using such a great amount of this green because they offset it at different parts with a complimentary color (the orange). When doing content areas it is good to use white, or a light variation of your main color as a background unless absolutely necessary with a dark font (usually dark grey or black). This makes it easy for a reader to read the content on your website, take LifeSpy.com for example again, they use a white background with a high contrasting grey color for the text, which makes it easy on the reader’s eyes.

Finishing
Before you finish a design and ship it off to the client it is best to have a look at your design in a browser setting to make sure that it will place well on the web. Sometimes if it looks good in Photoshop, in a program window but will look quite different when bringing it into a browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer due to the width, bars and toolbars and other things a browser introduces. I slice and save my layouts and preview them in a browser, coding them just to the point I can visualize the way it will be when it is actually coded. If you have no coding experience, as an alternative saving the layout as an image and posting it to the web can help give a slight idea to how it will look.

Hopefully these tips will help you maximize your design abilities and get the end result to the client efficiently and to their standards.

Tags: Web Design, Business, Creativity, Colors, Client Relations