No matter what reason you have for creating a website, you want it to look good. Nobody wants to turn away visitors from there website because it was poorly done. Good website design can be considered a subjective topic. What one person may consider a great looking website, another might consider to be poor. But there are some foundational principles that all websites should have.

If you have been a frequent user of the Web, you would have undoubtedly visited many sites that vary widely in their design, content, and layout. There are endless possibilities to how a website can be created. You can find visually stunning sites being created using Flash or any other creative web software while others are just basic text sites that simply provide facts and information.

Regardless of the nature, topic, or content of a website, the following article provides just a few of the foundational web designing principles to incorporate into your website to provide an enjoyable and easy viewing experience for your visitors.

Home Page
The homepage is argueably the most important page of your entire site. This is where it all starts. 99% of the time, the homepage is the very first page that visitors will come to. It should contain your website logo, name, and top level navigation links to the rest of your site. It informs your visitors what your site is all about and will be the determining factor if they wish to stay on your site. Your homepage should encourage your visitor to take some sort of action.

Navigation
One of the most important aspects of your navigational structure is to be consistent in its placement. It is not a good idea to make the navigation links different on every page. First, it makes it difficult for you to change and update. Next, and more importantly, it confuses the visitor. You don't want to make the visitor have to learn a new navigation structure for every page they view. Again, consistency is very important. You want your site to flow and be easy to follow.

Fonts & Text
You want your visitors to be able to read what you want to tell them, so font size shouldn't vary too much. It shouldn't be so small that it makes it hard to read but not to big where it takes up too much space on your site. Typically, it is a good idea to stick to 12 to 13 points.

When it comes to font colors, it obvious that you want to make it easy to read. Contrasting colors work best like black font on a white background. Too often webmasters will create sites with font colors to similar to the background color or use colors that blend together making it harder to read.

The way your content text is laid out is also an important consideration. Again, you want to make your website easy to read so how your content is arranged can be helpful. For example, having one big paragraph that takes up an entire page may deter your visitors from wanting to even begin to read what may be very important content. By breaking up large content into smaller paragraphs and adding paragraph headers (such as in this article), visitors can quickly and easily see what the content is about and decide if they want to read further.

Graphics
Using images, pictures, and other graphics adds a sense of aesthetics and makes your website more exciting. But too many graphics can make your site too cluttered and disorganized. Also, having too many graphics can overpower your site and your content. Unless your site is somehow associated with graphics like a web design site or photography site, you should keep images to a minimum.

File size is also another important factor when using images. Certain image file types are larger than others and are not appropriate for websites. Generally, Gif and JPEG image files are the most widely accepted and used in websites. Gif's are best to use when there are few colors in the picture. JPEG's have more colors so are better for photographs.

In Conclusion
There are other principles that should be taken into consideration when designing a website, but this is the very least that you should consider for your site. By keeping these principles in mind, you can build from it and no matter how your site evolves, you can rest assure that it will remain clear and consistent in design.