Redesigning Your Site: Ideas for Inspiration

If you're like me, you get tired of looking at the same, boring layout of your page, and you want to change it constantly. Sometimes, though, it gets hard to come up with great ideas. Well, I have a couple of examples of recently redesigned web pages to show you that are, in actuality, rather simple, and that may give you some ideas and inspiration for your next site redesign.

First, let's look at a personal homepage that incorporates a simple, consistent style, namely mine. I have just recently scrapped the whole site and redesigned it from scratch, incorporating a simpler theme called "blue fire" (I got the idea by looking at the negative image of a flame). All of my pages include a small graphic in the upper-left-hand corner of each page that says "blue fire" and a little scrolling message to the right of the graphic (with the help of the <marquee> tag). Also, with the help of CSS (see last article), I can have every page look the same font-wise by putting the same <style> information in the header of each page. Peruse thru my pages, and look at the source code to find out how I did these things.

Another personal homepage I had in mind is that of a member of my webring, alternadesign. Her name is Sherrie, and her site is slide. In this redesign, she's decided to let electric lime green run rampant all over the place, and to include some graphics that are (what look like) cityscapes with that same electric lime green infiltrating them. As you can see, she's got a sort of minimalistic, "less is more" theme all tied together with the same colour. Colour is an important part of having a good, consistent style, and sometimes the best ideas I've had revolve around picking a favourite colour and running with it. In all honesty, I tried to incorporate that minimalistic design in my web site. Thanks for the inspiration, Sherrie!

I guess what I'm trying to do is to get you to look around the web and get some inspiration! As with all other art forms, the best inspiration comes from looking at the works of your fellow artists. Look at their code, too, as your browse thru their sites. That alone can show you how to do several things you would never have thought possible. If you get stuck, and can't get some stylistic element that you want to include in your site to work right, go to a reference site to learn more about it (Webmonkey is a good site), or just ask someone. You can e-mail me with any question you have about designing, and if I don't know the answer, I'll find it for you. The only limit you have in creating your dream web site is how much you want to learn about the creating process.