He shook his head in despair, as he told me that every year he sees new magazines hit the newsstands with the publications' titles placed vertically on the magazine cover.
"Whenever I see this," he said, "I know it has been produced by a new publishing company that does not understand the industry. Anyone with any experience of periodical publishing knows that publications with vertical titles fail, or at least have to change quickly to survive. The market has taught us this lesson hundreds, if not thousands of times, but still people make the same mistake."
This message is just as relevant to website layout as it is to magazine design. The web has been around for long enough that rules and best practise have emerged from years of trial error by thousands of website owners. You can either go with the flow and be grateful that you can learn from the experience of others, or you can swim against the tide and try to convince the market that you are right and they are wrong.
I would suggest that swimming downstream is far easier and will give you a much greater chance of success.
To understand which layouts work you only need to look at the industry gorillas. These are the online content publishers who have been around for years, and who have tested just about every layout combination. Good examples are some of the most read websites on the internet including:
- BBC (www.bbc.com)
- The Financial Times (www.ft.com)
- The Economist (www.economist.com)
- The Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)
You will quickly start to recognise elements of the page layouts which are common across all these sites. Just as with print newspapers and magazines, these are the layouts that have proven to sit most comfortably with the reader and with the way online users want to consume content.
The key design and layout elements which should remain constant are: Masthead across the top ? the masthead is where the logo goes and usually imagery that supports the subject matter on the website.
Left hand column should contain all the primary navigation, which should remain constant across the whole website. It should list all the main categories of the website, so users can find their way around from every page.
Right hand column on the homepage should provide navigation to individual pages in the site which you want to highlight. Or it can be used for small applications, such as email newsletter sign-up, scrolling news headlines, links to the forum, etc. This column tends to disappear on the content pages to leave more space for the article and images.
Top menu bar ? some sites have most of their navigation in the top menu bar which goes across the page under the masthead (take a look at www.guardian.co.uk or www.forbes.com as examples). I don't like this for two reasons. First it restricts the number of menu links that you can have. Second it usually means that the site has flash based drop down menus to enable them to accommodate more links. Flash menus are not user friendly. They force your reader to search for links to the content they are looking for. Don't make your user work for their answers. Also search engines find it harder to index sites with flash menus
Bottom menu bar ? This strip at the foot of every page tends to contain links to the sites terms and conditions, privacy statement, sitemap, etc.
The central column contains the content. On the homepage this can be a combination of an introduction to the website and teasers to articles. On the content pages, the articles and images sit in the central column.
Search top right on every page ? this is the search box used to search the content of the website. This is a less rigid placement than it used to be, but you can't go wrong if you place it top right.
Time and date ? usually placed on the right hand side under the masthead. This is optional, but does give readers the impression that the site is up-to-date.
Within this layout there is a great deal of flexibility to add your own personality and styles, particularly when you overlay your design on the basic page structure. However, at all times your number one goal should be constant; that is to make your website simple and intuitive, for every reader that visits. To achieve this learn from those sites that have a lot of experience.
Don't be the person that puts a vertical title on the front cover!
You have your sales letter written so now all you need to do is lay out the page and the rest of the site. You have two options, you can do it the easy way or you can do it the hard way. Here is the hard way. First, you have to decide on the overall layout. Do you want a header or not. Most sites you have seen have headers but how do you create one. You open Photoshop and start to play with some shapes, colors, find some clip-art and when you are all done you have something that does not really look very professional, and it took you all day to create. Now you have to think about the rest of the layout.You know you need a headline, but how big should you make it? What color should you make it? How big should your sub-headline be? What color should that be? You spend about three hours playing back and forth with sizes and colors and you finally think you have it. Now you look at your other text. Your bullet points listing the benefits don't really have the impact you want. But you don't know how to add those big check marks that you see on other sites. You know your testimonials should be segregated in boxes with different backgrounds but you aren't sure how that works. You think it has something to do with tables but they don't seem to work right when you try to insert them. You look at the HTML code to see if the answer lies there, but you realize you may be in over your head. That is the hard way, here is the easy way. Find a reputable graphic design shop that knows how to put a sales page together. Tell them what you want and how much you want to spend, they design the page, and you are done. While they were doing that, you spend all the time you would have spent trying to design your site, working on your marketing plans so that when your site goes live you are ready to drive traffic to it and generate sales. If you choose the easy way, there are some things you should look for when hiring a graphic design group to do your work. There are lots of graphic designers that will create wonderful looking pages for you. The problem is, those wonderful pages will not sell anything. You need to find graphics professionals who are also sales professionals. That is much harder to do. You want a graphics company that knows internet marketing. You want to find graphic designers that know how important headlines are, the importance of a good header, how sub headlines work through the sales letter, how testimonials should be used and how they should be formatted. The graphic designers should know the flow of the sales page process from the attention grabbing headline all the way down to the prominent guarantee with the large guarantee badge to make sure the viewer does not miss it. You also want a graphics group that will not cost you an arm and a leg. You do not want to mortgage your house just to have a website designed. Good graphic design groups should have some reasonable cost packages that you can use without breaking the bank. Sales page templates are a good example of a value priced solution. A good firm will be able to provide you with templates, optimized as sales pages, that you only have to cut and paste your text into. You have two choices when it comes time to put your sales page together. You can spend a lot of time and effort on your own, get frustrated and end up with a less than professional looking site, or you can do it the easy way. Hire a good graphics group with internet marketing knowledge, and let them do it. Spend your time on marketing, which is how you make money and let someone else take care of the mechanics.
Both Miles Galliford & Paras Nagpal are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Miles Galliford has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, E Books and Internet Marketing. SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web.Website: