Website design

Web Design fundamentals

Creating your own web apps and websites has become easier than ever because of the amount of free tutorials there exists online. However, one thing which i haven't seen often is the importance of website design. I have gathered some of the main fundamentals you should be aware of while designing websites.

Color theory

First thing to do is to pick your primary colors for the website. Those two or three colors should be used every time you create a button, site background, image, etc. 

Using too many colors simply doesn't look visually appealing. It's also important to pick colors which go well together.

For example :green and red are often used together to signify errors and successes. You should also be aware of the psychological effects of colors. The most common example of this is how green is used to describe success and red is used for failure and errors. I recommend looking at colors which Bootstrap has put in their buttons, it can serve as a good starting point.

Mobile first

While designing websites it's important to start with the mobile design. You can always scale your components up, but if you start designing your websites with a large desktop screen, you won't be able to scale it down. Starting with the mobile view also allows you to decide the most important elements of your site, because it simply cannot hold a lot of elements due to it's size.

Steal the design

Whenever i am creating a new web application i search online for apps with similar functionalities. This research allows me to 'borrow' ideas that they have come up with and use them in my own projects. While i was building an application that has similar functionalities as GitHub, i simply looked at the layout which GitHub profiles had and recreated it to serve my own purposes.

In conclusion...

Those were some of the most important things which i came up with. I hope they can be useful during your journey in becoming a web developer!