Creating Innovative Website Designs – Why, and How?
A website, like any other form of art, is an expression of personality intended to reflect the individual or organization that exists behind it. When someone visits your website, you want them to remember it, which means that it needs to stand out from the crowd and possess something special that none of your competitors has. Website design is a little bit like the cover of a book – perhaps you shouldn’t be judging your entire opinion of that site from what you see on the home page, but as visual creatures, we’re drawn in by the aesthetically attractive and interesting. If you want your users to come back to your website, interact with it, and engage with your company, then you need to provide not only remarkable content but also an innovative and functional home for that content. Think about what features you could utilize to make the experience easier, or more enjoyable for your user. Maybe your search functionality is a little slow and jagged, or your navigation menu could do with a bit of a re-design. Either way, you don’t want to use the same updates that everyone else in your industry has already got, so how do you become more innovative in your design?
Begin with a Blank Canvas
Some amazing work can evolve out of the scraps of another design or portion of work that has been done before, but if you want a truly innovative result, then you can’t recycle any of your past projects. To achieve something creative, you need to be creative, and this means starting from scratch. Don’t even set your background to white until you’ve decided whether that’s the color that’s really right for you. Avoid starting your design at the top of the page or following the same routine that you’ve used time and time again. If you have a fantastic idea about how your navigation might work or have come up with some concepts on how to display your titles, then start there first. It might seem strange to start with the details and work backward into the bigger content, but it’s a good way to get your creative juices flowing and ensure you’re in the right mindset.
Look offline for your inspiration
The biggest pitfall in creating something new for web designers is that there are so many resources available online with templates and guides that make cheating so very easy. Online blog posts and galleries can offer up inspirational examples of web design if you’re simply looking for a good jumping point, but it’s hard to create something innovative if you already have someone else’s work in mind. Instead of looking online for help, try to look around you or in the industry that you’re making a website for, to see whether anything springs to mind there. You may be surprised by the creative factors that can jump into your imagination at the strangest of times. Of course, it’s going to be hard to start completely from scratch, but the right design could be the one to jumpstart an entire generation of new ideas. Remember, the first thing you come up with may not always be a success. A lot of people will fail, but the best thing you can do is make sure you do so often and early – then learn from it.
Design outside of the box
There are plenty of online grid systems, such as the 960, that can provide a wonderful format for viewing content, simply because they are easy to use, increase efficiency and improve the consistency of your overall website layout. However, handcuffing yourself to a strict layout mechanism could be the thing that prevents you from creating something completely new. Obviously, it is going to matter how big your page is going to be at the end of the design, but when you’re just getting started, give yourself the option to be flexible. Instead of building your idea around the restraints that already exist, try building your idea and then trying to find a way to bend the restraints so that your idea works. It’s going to be difficult, but it could create something amazing.
Do at least one thing you’ve never done before
Having experience from previous building projects can be incredibly useful. It makes the process of designing much more efficient, easier, and quicker. However, using the exact same techniques every time can get stagnant very quickly, and when you’re creating a website in a constantly evolving technological world – stagnation just won’t do. Trying something new is not going to work for you every time, but every once in a while you’ll find something amazing in a technique you never even considered before, and that will be worth every failure.
