Everyday I run home to my computer, and check out the 20+ css and web galleries I am subscribed to. There is no doubt all the sites that are featured are nice sites, but most of them just aren’t memorable. So I decided to try and figure out what it actually was that made these few sites stand out.
The first thing I noticed was color scheme.
To me, I tend to forget most of the “organic” colored websites. By organic I mean dark shades of green, browns, and possibly desaturated shades of blue. I’m not saying these are bad colors. I’m just saying that these seem to stand out much less than websites which use other colors. Besides organic colors, almost all other colors stood out the same to me. The only variation in this pattern came with erraticwisdom. This site uses a black and white color scheme with one very bright accent color (yellow). This use of colors definitely made erraticwisdom stand out much more than any other site I saw that day.
The next thing I noticed was the use of typography.
Most sites use the same exact typographic patterns. Again, erraticwisdom is a perfect example of a site that varies from this pattern. Erraticwisdom uses large post titles that grab your attention very quickly. Another example of good typography is BienBienBien. They used an organic color scheme very effectively here, and backed it up with very nice typography. They use almost newspaper style fonts, but the titles stand out because of their boldness. Also, on rollover, the titles are emphasized with a red background. This makes the design “pop” even more.
The last thing I found that separated the average designs from the great ones was the uniqueness of the layout.
A lot of the average sites (even below average sites) follow the typical “header-navigation-layout/sidebar-footer” style layout. When A website breaks from this layout, it adds a whole new level of intrigue. A perfect example of this is Benekdesign. This website uses horizontal scrolling as apposed to traditional vertical scrolling.
Another way to add uniqueness to your layout is through “non-standard” navigation. David Hellmann does this perfectly on his website.
Please remember, these are just my opinions, and there are exceptions to all of these “rules”.
If you want to add to this list, or disagree in any way with what I said please comment.