As a student of art history, I've always been amazed at the way the great masters use composition to control the flow of the eye across a painting, telling a story. Just like a great painting, the overall composition of your site's pages need to draw visitors' eyes to what's most important.
Our Western-language culture trains us to process information top-down and left-to-right. We can't change that, but we can use it to our advantage. Start with the assumption that your viewers eyes will start at the top left corner of your page. Then use cues like color, contrast, size, and relative placement to tell your audience what the most important elements in your composition are.
To be consistent, you'll need to create a set of rules for how to visually treat information with different levels of importance, and follow these consistently. Modern browsers support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), allowing all the pages on your site to share the same set of rules.
In your stylesheets, be sure to create size, color, placement, and font treatment standards for:
About the Author
Dan Wilson is a marketing consultant who has been helping companies reach the next level through their communications efforts for over 14 years. Dan's passion for helping clients achieve their goals has led to many successful campaign launches for Fortune 1000 companies. Dan also served for several years on the program advisory panel for UC Davis Extension, developing course curriculum for and teaching web design and multimedia courses. Dan holds an AA in Art and a BS in Business Marketing, and is a Principal and Founder of MarketDifference Communications Group, a brand development and marketing communications firm based in the Sierra Foothills.
