Graphic Website Design – also known as visual design – refers to the visual retrieval of information using website design elements such as color, pictures, page schematics, and text. These elements must be chosen carefully to design a website that offers effective information retrieval by your website viewers

Effectively used graphics and appropriate colors can create an interest or catch the reader’s eye. Site visitors have a tendency to quickly move on to the next website when they see an on-the-face, unpleasant color with intense graphics. If you choose to use considerable graphics for your website design, you must carefully evaluate the colors before choosing one. The graphics that you choose use must be able to express the essence of your brand and vision and not just decorative to the website. For companies trying to reach out to a large audience on the internet, it is essential to optimize the size of your graphics file for the desired page loading speed

Graphics should facilitate the information retrieval for the viewer without being overly distractive to the visitor. A leading graphic website design company can use more graphics on its website than a company selling widgets on the Internet, because graphics can speak for the quality of graphic designs that the website company offers. Again, the use of a 30 second information retrieval rule explained in our Custom Website Design page must be evaluated for the appropriate use of graphic designs.

Color Theory–Custom Graphic Website Designs

Are some colors better than others? Do most people still like the same colors that they liked a decade ago?
It is worthwhile to assess why a few great marketing companies of our time picked some particular colors and used them for their advertising and website campaigns for years. You may have noticed that American Express, Citibank and Microsoft have their websites designed with a heavy emphasis on the blue color, one of the primary natural colors from Newton’s color wheel. These are very successful marketing companies of our time and it’s worth looking at them to evaluate any patterns. Many popular commercial software package companies that used a light gray background for screens in the late 90s have now moved on to an even lighter or white background. The color combinations that we usually see on websites can be categorized into one of the following three schemes:

• Contrast colors
• Colors of the same hue
• Colors those are adjacent to one another on the color wheel.

Some of the great marketing companies of our time seem to choose colors that are analogous or close to each other on the color wheel. The blue sky and the deep blue sea are certainly harmonious to our eyes and more people prefer to see those natural colors on websites.

Graphic Website Design – size of your page files

When you opt to have a graphics-heavy design for your website, you must consider the page loading time for your target viewers. Page loading speed is a key determinant of successful website design. If your target customers include rural area viewers, who tend to have Internet connection of lower speeds, it is recommended to keep the total graphics under 70 kilobytes. On the contrary, if your target viewers are predominantly from urban or affluent sections of the society, who tend to use high speed internet connections, you can optionally use graphics-heavy design for your website. Thus, size of graphics on each website needs to be optimized for the target viewers.

During the website design process, you should get opinions from a sample of your target viewers regarding page loading time. As always, if you cannot please the majority, go with plurality.