Page layouts
The layout of your website can be a deciding factor on whether your visitors will stay on your website or leave with an impatient click. You could think of the layout as a map. If it's easy for the visitors to "read" the map, they are more likely to stick around and find the content you're providing. Let's take a look at some of the typical layouts we see on the Web today.
Bread and butter layouts
When we're designing a layout for a web page, there are a number of sections that we need to include. These sections can be broken into the following:
- Consistent content: This does not change throughout the site. Examples of this type of content are logos, navigation bars, and footers.
- Changing content: This is the part of the page that changes throughout the site, usually the main content. In some situations, the content of the sidebar may also change.
A web designer's job is to create a layout that keeps the visitor focused on the content while keeping it nice and easy to navigate around the site. Some examples of conventional or bread and butter site layouts are shown in the following figure:
You have a very short amount of time to capture a visitor's attention. So by choosing one of these basic layouts, you're using a tried and tested setup, which many web users will feel at home with. Don't worry that these layouts look "boxy". You can use images, colors, and typefaces, which complement the purpose of your site to completely disguise the fact that every web page is essentially made up of boxes.