Fire Studios

We all know the saying Don't Judge a book by it's cover, but in the big virtual space we call the internet, the first look is vitally important.

It's those first few seconds where a user will scan your page and look at the design and a little content, i know i find myself doing this all the time. To me, i feel that if a website is going to have good quality content, then the author will at least try and put some effort into a quality design.

Below i've got some great examples of great design and some examples of horrible design. I'll be explaining how each appeals to me, and how it can also appeal to users. This is a show case and also a way for designers, developers and webmasters to learn about how design affects how users perceive your website on first impression.

Great Design

BootB - Unlimited Creativity

This website i feel has a great design and UI experience for the user. It's a really modern design with great contrasting colors and easy to use UI.

I'm particularly fond of this design, probably because I'm a sucker for hand drawn style designs.

For me, this design reflects on the website's tagline (Unlimited Creativity) and also the websites goal. For sharing ideas worldwide and for companies to purchase these ideas.

On a usability factor, i'm giving this site an 8/10. For a design factor, a 9/10.

Tomáš Pojeta - Portfolio

This website has a really great design, it's got 3 parts to it, and your only currently seeing one.

In this design it's got the sky with a rocket, ground level with an island (What you can see to the left) and below the sea with a submarine.

I find this to be a great reflection on the work by Tomáš and possibly his personality - Creative.

It certainly gets a 10/10 for both usability and design.

Terrible Design

Alternative Transport Services

Oh, what to say about this design. On the first look i had, i didn't like the layout, the colors or any of the images which of some had no relevance to the genre of the website.

There were some content issues with the website aswell, but my main issues were a few things. Navigation - The site as very hard to navigation, no major section dedicated just to navigation or to make it obvious where to navigate. Colors - There were too many and some were too contrasting on the black background. Layout - Everything was pretty much all over the place and not in a semantic order.

Virginia Driver Improvement

The design for this website is not great, it's got colors that don't quite match, content in areas where it doesn't quite look right and also no sematic content order.

The websites navigation isn't obvious, there is content in nearly every free space and there are not that many cleary defined elements (Header, Navigation, Footer).

In Conclusion...

So basically in conclusion, i've given 2 examples of great design and 2 examples of not so good design. Design is one of the most important parts of creating a website, with content coming in second and development coming in third.
Next time you design your website do take your time, as a majority of users will most probably take a quick look at the design and judge the content quality based upon that.