Modern Web Design - What People Want In The Web 2.0 Era

Modern web design focuses on one thing, Web 2.0. Now, by “Web 2.0″ I am not talking about AJAX, instead I am talking about the movement from image and flash based layouts to CSS based ones.

Centered Content

When you think of Web 2.0 website layouts you should think of one thing - centered content. Having your main content centered is the “in” thing nowadays.

Generally, the main content area of this type of layout can have either a fixed or dynamic width. You could make it a strict 900 pixels, or you could make it stretch out to fit your visitor’s screen better. Most designers opt for the fixed width option, as it is the easiest to work with, so that is what I will talk about for the rest of this article.

The width of your content should be at least 900 pixels. This includes any sidebars, and the actual text. According to most surveys, the majority of users run their computers with a resolution of at least 1024 by 968 pixels. So a 900 pixel width will work nicely for the majority of the users, but it also won’t be too big for the users stuck on 800*600.

Sidebar and Top Navigation Bar

The majority of modern website layouts have a sidebar and/or a top navigation bar. The links on the top navigation bar should either be aligned to the left, or to the right. Very rarely will they be centered.

The same goes for the logo, it will either be left or right, very rarely will be it centered. I am not quite sure why this is, it is just one of those things.

Some layouts have three columns. One for content, one for links, and one for ads, but generally they have one or two.

Colors

For a website layout color scheme to be successful it must have two things, 1) a base color, and 2) contrasting colors. This layout uses a dark red/maroon color for its base color scheme. And the colors I use work out well because 1) they are contrasting, and 2) they are not too contrasting. By “not too contrasting” I mean it is not like white/black, it is more like dark red/dark gray.

You should try and keep your layout the same throughout your entire site. If you have an off page it can really throw off your visitors. Anyone who had Internet access back in the late 90s/early 2000s knows how horrible some color schemes were back them. Yellow and white, red and blue, and every page had a different layout, ick. No more of that nonsense, please.

Example Layouts

Well it is nearly the end of my post, so here are some examples of bad layouts vs good layouts.

Well, that is it. If you want some free website layouts try visiting some of the sites below:

freelayouts.com
hotfreelayouts.com

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