Three pillars of (web)design
…at least from my point of view.
Typography (or whatever you want to call it; the way letters are handled)
If it’s unreadable, your visitors will not be able to read anything, the more readable your website is, the more they will be able to read.
One of the most common cause of problems is “liquid layout”. Say what you want, but having 150 letters on one line is no good. Wikipedia is guilty of this. They try to make up for it by having short paragraphs, which usually works rather well (or you can resize your browser window, but I like to keep it fullscreen), but it’s far from optimal.
Another common problem is “designers” raping the letters by setting unusual letterspacing. This can be excused in titles and such, but having longer text with any letterspacing but default (be it lower or higher) should be a prisonable crime.
Wisely choosing linespacing (line-height) can also significantly help improve the readability — the longer the lines, the bigger linespacing you should use.
It’s usually a bad idea to set text-align to “justify”. That’s because today’s browsers can’t break words. I use justified text here, because I think it looks a bit better, but maybe I should drop it (comments are welcome!
)
And one more thing… the letters should be in a colour that is readable on the chosen background… which brings us to the next part:
Colours
Colours are very important, as they are the first thing your visitor will notice. What colors you should use depends largely on your audience, but you should just use common sense (don’t be like the wackos who use completely black background surrounded by the shiniest green you could imagine
).
Whitespace
I consider whitespace (the empty areas that are not filled with anything, they don’t necessarily have to be white
) to be the most important and most overlooked aspect of webdesign. If you need to separate two elements, inserting some white space is the most natural and effective thing to do. The more of it, the more separated the elements become. It’s actually amazingly simple.
), it’s basically impossible to forget (you will forget some parts, but when you return, you’ll remember them instantly).