Style, That Indefinable Something

The ideas you start out with shouldn't be inflexible but should change and adapt to the emerging design.

Designing the look and feel of your site is an ongoing process.

You probably had a number of ideas before you started the whole design process. Those ideas may have changed as you defined your goals, identified your target audience and organised the structure of your content into flowcharts, content lists and storyboards. That's as it should be. As you worked through these steps you refined the goals of the project, giving yourself more information and defined a tighter project brief. The ideas you start out with shouldn't be inflexible but should change and adapt to the emerging design.

But what if you still don't have any strong ideas about the look and feel of your site? Now is the time to make these decisions. What kind of thing do you have in mind? Bright colours and startling backgrounds or clean, efficient and businesslike? Elegant and classic or warm and welcoming? Formal or informal?

Take a good look around the web at how other people present themselves. Find out what you do and don't like. Pay attention to how different colours and layouts affect the way information is presented. Dark colours can be very sombre but they can also be very elegant. Bright colours can be very loud but they can also be very cheerful and energetic, white can look dull and uninspired or clean and crisp and classy.

A minimalist approach with a small amount of text and graphics carefully laid out on screen can be very sophisticated. The extrovert look has lots of graphics, icons and text filling the screen from corner to corner. It's dramatic and dynamic when handled well.

This is a decision only you can make. Use your goal statement to decide if the look does anything to further your goals. Check with your user profile to decide if your target audience will be attracted by the design. Does it present the right image, is it easy to use? The content list will give you an idea of how practical your choice is. Do you have the time or the budget to implement the look you want? Do you have an accurate idea of how long each item will take to create? If you want a special background how long will it take to make, ten minutes, an hour, a day? Are bandwidth and browser issues important to you and your users? How will this impact on the look you choose?

These are the questions you need to think about before you commit yourself to a particular look. Use two or three pages as a prototype and try out different styles of presentation to help answer these questions. If you can, show the prototypes to a selection of your target audience and get their feedback.

Make sure the look you chose is the right one for you.

Projects will often go through the design process again at this stage. You don't always get everything right on the first pass. This is no bad thing if it helps you to tighten up your focus and clarify your goals. You may feel your goals are fine and your user profile is spot on, so go back to the brainstorming session and start again from there. If it's just the look and layout that you can't decide on, experimenting with prototypes will help you decide what you don't like and re-examining your user profile will point you towards what your users want.

Your storyboard and flowchart should be flexible until you have a final brief that you are happy with. Then you'll be ready to start coding the HTML, making your graphics and animations with the confidence of a good tight, well-specified project plan behind you.