Avoid Beginner Design Mistakes

Whether you are designing your website yourself or working with someone who adapts your creative ideas, it only takes a few missteps to turn a promising design project into a disaster. When you’re too eager to be creative or original and you are inexperienced, you tend to forget your readers, whom you want to reach and engage.

You don’t have a website without content. But nobody wants to read that content without the right design. And your design choices reflect your brand and your organization’s appearance and professionalism.

So, content and design matter. Can you pull that off by yourself without creative design experience? Sure you can.

Effective designs follow basic guidelines that even beginners can apply. Here’s a checklist to help you tackle your next creative project:

Good design practices

• make sure to apply lots of white space around elements so that the design doesn’t feel cluttered
• use font sizes to suggest a visual hierarchy: large to small (headlines > subheads > plain text); content flows from top to bottom
• use clean, easy to read fonts, like sans serifs; avoid Times New Roman (the Microsoft Word default font)
• go for usability and functionality over pure aesthetics