People have chosen to spend their precious time looking at a thing you made, isn’t that cool? Making a webpage has a lot in common with hospitality — when someone makes the effort to come to you, it’s good to make them feel comfortable and welcome.
There’s nothing wrong with simple and easy. If you find yourself needing crazy code or fancy features to make a page work, often it’s better to start over and look for a simpler solution.
Pick the most important thing your audience needs to do on your page — once you decide, put that thing big and bold at the top of the page. Sometimes this means making hard choices about what’s important! It’s not easy, but your audience will thank you for it. After all, if you can’t decide what’s important on your page, don’t expect your audience to be able to either.
People don’t read webpages, they scan. If there’s important information that your audience needs to see, make it big and visual! Don’t trust that people will read all (or even most) of the words you put on the page, especially if those words are in big blocks of text.
Always be looking for ways to make text shorter and clearer. People appreciate it when you’re mindful of their time and their attention (see #1). Also, it gives you more space to make text bigger and more visual.
Exciting and engaging photos and visuals are a huge part of making a successful webpage — it’s no accident that every single blog post and news article has an image at the top. People are visual creatures! Here are some resources:
If you look at existing superpages, almost all of them have a big photo and a big headline in the first section.
Superpages are intended to be visual and encourage people to scroll down — don’t feel like you need to cram everything in. Using sections set to “narrow” width and “medium” (or larger) margins is a good way to keep a page feeling light and easily scannable.
It’s good to find a balance of background images/colors. You want enough colors/photos to keep things lively, but not so many that it becomes too intense. Some tips:
