When you’re designing a website, you really don’t have much space to put all the information. Sometimes not enough, sometimes too much. When the web designers don’t have enough to put on the site, they slap the header with a pretty picture, and when they have too much information, they cram everything on the first third of the page. Your job as a webmaster is to decide what things go where. Now, this concept isn’t new, but by the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to organize information. You have to find out the most important content vs the least important content, and then divide that information into 4 parts:
- Header: This is the most important part, this is where your identity goes. This part defines you, who you are and what you’re all about.
- Main Content: Information that is updated frequently, a perfect place to get user’s attention.
- Sidebar: The content here is important, but not too important as most users will ignore this portion, because of what’s called an “blind spot”. Sidebars are almost always ignored because of people’s natural habit. For example, when you’re working on something, you move everything to the side, so it doesn’t distract you from your focal point.
- Footer: Rarely people look at here, so the least important information should be thrown here. Such as copyrights, privacy policy, other “junk” stuff that only certain people might consider reading.
This is the most traditional way of designing websites. Figure 1 is what people are used to when reading a newspaper, with no central focus. Figure 2 is a traditional way that websites used to look like in Web 1.0 days. The new way is the Web 2.0, Figure 3, most blogs have a right sidebar simply because they want user’s attention on the main content. It’s just what people became used to. As you can see from the above figure, simply by moving the black line, you can easily direct user’s attention in different directions.
Five Rules on How To Use the Space Efficiently
- Unnecessary Pictures: Don’t take up too much space with unnecessary pictures. This can be a distraction and annoying at times.
- Don’t State the Obvious: Your users are smart enough to understand the most common elements. If it’s a navigation, don’t say, “Menu”, “Navigation”. For example, look at this site, the categories aren’t list under “category” label, it’s just there, I don’t have to tell you that those are the categories or label “posted/file under”! You’re smart enough to know that. If you can eliminate labeling little things like that, you can save a lot of space and put much more important information on there.
- Do a Little Research: Find out what your users are looking for. Put the most commonly looked for things where users will most likely look first. Use of colors and typography can really come in handy when you’re trying to get user’s attention.
- Don’t Annoy Them: Please don’t annoy your users with unnecessary items, such as flashing images, moving objects, distracting colors. Things like that simply annoy the users and they are not afraid to leave your site.
- Don’t Clutter: Not wasting space on your site does not mean clutter everything together. Break things in different parts, use bullet points. As I always say, web designing isn’t like your tenth grade English paper, be creative!
Having said all that, let me paraphrase a great writer: I apologize for this post being so long, I simply didn’t have the leisure to make it shorter.
