Part 1
What does aesthetics mean?
Aesthetics deals with the nature and appreciation of beauty. Adding aesthetics to your web design is about making your website beautiful. And who doesn’t appreciate beauty?
Adding beauty to your website makes your website more pleasing and enjoyable for your viewers.
Of course beauty is not the only factor that affects your visitor’s experience, but it is an important one. Others factors include how easily your website visitor can find what they are looking for, how easily they can obtain what they are looking for, and what unexpected surprises they find on your site that they were not looking for, but were happy or grateful to find.
So how do you incorporate aesthetics into your site? You need to first recognize and develop your own inner sense of what is beautiful. This is your best barometer for beauty. Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then start with what you experience as beautiful.
For example, look around the web for websites that you experience as beautiful. What you like will be different than what others like, and that is the way it should be. Trust what you like, because your site is most likely to reflect some aspect of who you are. You are either creating it to present something that you are selling or sharing with others, or someone has hired you or asked you to create something for them, and in this case, they have entrusted their website to your senses. Even when you are creating a website for someone else, and you are incorporating what they want, and how they want it to look, you still have to develop your own inner sense of aesthetics to apply to the many fine details that your client has not specified.
So look at other sites, (check out my designs, and check back here, because I will be regularly sharing sites that I like under my “Designs that I Like” category). What do you like about them? Colors, fonts, layout, function, and so on. Start here, and keep track of what you like. Keep track on paper if that helps, but mostly keep track in your heart. Take the time to identify what specifically you like. This will help a lot, because, as they say, it is all in the details. The more you look around and find what you like, the more information you will discover about what you like, (what you don’t like), and what you experience as beautiful.
To be continued . . .
