Lessons to Learn from Beautiful Websites

Our host today is Derek Jensen. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers of Site Sketch 101, check out our guest posting invitation here.

A few days ago, you all were presented with a collection of The 35 Most Beautiful Websites in 2010. But as we looked through these stunning sites, we were interested in more than just casually browsing through an art gallery. We’re interested in consistently learning and improving our own websites and blogs.

The creators of those websites designed them with much different purposes than many bloggers. Many of us as bloggers strive to draw new visitors into our websites. We focus on clear navigation and easy usability. We want the page to load quickly and we want the written material to stand out quickly and easily.

Our mission as bloggers is to present content. It’s to build subscribers. It’s to draw users into engaging with us through comments and contact forms. It’s to convince users to visit our websites again and again to view our fresh content.

So with that in mind, let’s examine some of the powerful principles that underscore the work done by these amazing designers and focus on them in such a way as to allow us to achieve greater success in our mission.

They Break Barriers

Don’t just limit yourself to the typical blog style format. When we look to design our blog’s theme or critique it to our needs, we usually stay inside a few known barriers.

These known barriers are a well defined header that explains the overall mission of your blog, clear navigation links, and a quick eye on new content and how to stay connected with the blog.

But, do we obligate ourselves to break these barriers?

Most of us bloggers seems to act like we are trapt and that we have to stay within set barriers, because it comes from listening and reading many blogs about blogging. These blogs are all in agreement with one another, so we get worried that if we break these barriers we are doing it the wrong way.

They are all right in regards to what is popular and what the general approach should be.

Now, these websites do not take advice from these blogging tips in terms of design, because they have no need to. We need to take advice from both these websites and blogs about blogging and allow ourselves to push creativity and orginality.

They Deliver Powerful First Impressions

The internet is filled with users who will visit your website or blog and determine in a matter of seconds whether or not your material is worth digging into. Does the StumbleUpon crowd come to mind?

If you don’t have something amazing to catch the attention of casual browsers then you are going to be losing lots of valuable traffic back into the abyss. You don’t want to do that.

Take the time to create something that really stands out from the crowd. Make an effort to impress and show off. Make it look good.

They Tailor the Design to the Website’s Purpose

When looking at the 35 beautiful websites, don’t feel compelled to make your design look like theirs.

Their purpose is to show off their work through their design and attract new clients right off the bat. They don’t necessarily want to keep people coming back to their site everyday. It’s more of an announcement than a reoccuring keynote speech.

As bloggers, our purpose is to attract readers to keep them coming back over a long period of time. We certainly want to take elements from their design and customize them to fit our needs of keeping the audience engaged by featuring our content.

They Deliver Consistency in Their Design

A website design is composed of many different elements including sidebars, headers, icons, graphics, text fields, buttons, fonts, and more. If you visit many blogs you see that many people design these elements in a rather whimsical fashion.

Often bloggers will find sets of icons or graphics that really look nice. They’ll save them and load them onto their site even though they often don’t match the rest of their blog theme at all. Maybe it’s a set of glossy social bookmarking icons against a textured background. Perhaps a hand-sketched set of graphics against a Web 2.0 sleek-looking site.

Professional designers understand the need for consistency. Use similar textures. Coordinate your colors. Don’t use too many different fonts. Create a theme and stick with it.

Group Reflection

Those websites provide some pretty amazing ideas for us but it’s only useful for us if we can take some wisdom away by understanding their purpose and pushing our blog to the next level. Let’s use these lessons to grow in our ability to connect with people online.

So as we reflect on the work of these digital artists, let’s ask ourselves some questions to expand the way that we view our blog’s designs. Why did they organize their header the way they did? What kind of environment do the colors and textures create?