When considering a custom design for your WordPress site, there are important elements that are not necessarily within the syntax and mechanics of the template that should be kept in mind. For example, you may start with an idea, like “I want a blue background” but did you think about the fact that there are many variations to shades of blue? What about your text color? Headings? Accents? What about other important design elements other than colors? Custom WordPress design is just as important as the execution of coding the design. The elements of design that any artist uses are vital to any form of art, even the design of a page on the web. Nicasio Design & Development wants to help you get a better feel for the elements involved in designing your WordPress pages.

Another good example is the shape, which is important in establishing the style and flow of your custom WordPress design. Straight-edged designs usually convey a cleaner, masculine, and organized look while the use of curves usually indicates a more elegant, feminine, and relaxed look. The use of space and negative space is vital to a good custom WordPress template design. In the appropriate use of space – it should be used in a way that flows and should just plain work. If the custom WordPress design is “too busy,” it becomes hard to navigate and many people will find it annoying or even worse complicated to use. One thing to keep in mind is that one of the best things about a web page is that it can pretty much keep going. So, there is plenty of room to stretch out your content vertically.

Value, or how light or dark your design is, gives way to contrast and helps a designer develop a solid color scheme. Color choice is key and this design element ties in with the principles of contrast, harmony, and emphasis. These work well with lines, which are good for separating one thing from another. Whether physical lines like horizontal rules, color changes, implied lines  such as just spacing between sections – lines are useful for creating balance, repetition, and unity by having a coherent look throughout the page. For example, if you use alternating background colors for your WordPress posts, like bluee for the first post and pink for the next, it’s more visually pleasing to go green-pink-green-pink-green-pink than it is to go green-pink-pink-green-pink-pink because this variation offers more separation and your readers know that each color change is a new WordPress post.

Texture is more difficult to achieve on a web page because you can’t “feel” the pattern on the screen, but using a background pattern with a muted design that matches your custom WordPress template’s color scheme can be more visually pleasing than a solid matte background color. A sign of a good backgrounds is one that people won’t even notice at first glance. One color with two or three tints and shades and minimal contrast tend to be easier on the reader’s eyes and create more emphasis for the custom WordPress site content itself. It’s also a good idea to have background colors for the content rather than just the entire page. Why? Well, we find that separating areas of content from one another and making a solid foundation for the content of your custom WordPress site to appear on just works best.

Type, or the words themselves, tends to be the most important element in a custom WordPress site because it is the part that people visit the site for and drives your call(s) to action. Once the rest of your design is squared away, you can choose the font you want and how big, small, bold, italicized, etc you want your text to be. One option would be to make your headings all in small-caps, which are perfect for attention-grabbing lines, such as the titles of a post or the posting date. It’s not a good idea, however, to have any other major portion of your content in small-caps because it will make the reader feel like they are being virtually shouted at and could prove problematic for readers trying to get through reading the page(s).

Nicasio Design specializes in custom WordPress design and development solutions. Give us a call 912-292-1716, and ask for Jeff. We’d be glad to speak with you and help you get the WordPress solution you seek.