Provisional Theme

Theme

Your theme is the overall look, feel and style of your website. This includes things like the color scheme, layout and style elements.

Themes can incorporate things such as environment (e.g., sea, mountains, rivers, forest), culture (e.g., colours associated with different ethnic groups), content (e.g., business, workplace, voluntary, military), etc.

Sites like Squarespace (n.d.) have ideas and examples of different themes (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Squarespace theme picker..

So first decide what the overall theme of you website will be, then using this as the lens, decide on how the different aspects (following) will meet the overall theme.

Consider things like

• page layout,

  • Will you have a very large banner? This is pretty trendy at the moment but does waste a lot of space for sites where you want to have information. So is your site for advertising or for information?

• colour,

  • This will be governed by the theme, for example, a sea theme will emphasise blue while a forest green.

• space,

  • How much white space will you have around your objects? If you have an advertising site this could have different spacing than say a site listing engineering products.

• font

  • Remember that fonts are not necessarily available across different platforms (e.g. Arial is Helvetica in the Apple world), so better to say I will use a serif font like “Arial” and even identify the font family (a list of fonts that are used depending what is available)

  • For fonts don’t specify the px size as you want your pages to be responsive. Probably best to go with the defaults set in the browser.

• content placement.

  • How will you layout your content? Where will headings, menus, the content, footers be placed. Make sure you consider both mobile and PC based layouts. E.g., you may collapse the menus the hamburger icon on the mobile device.

Usability (User Interface (UI)) and the User Experience (UX)

Make sure you write up in the context of usability & user experience, e.g.

• Not just “I will use gold on a white background” but “as the site is for jewelry I will use gold on a white background so a user will get a sense of the quality of the products displayed” ,

• “Menus will be placed on the top so they are clearly visible when the page is displayed on both mobile and desktop devices”.

References

Squarespace (n.d.) Website Builder - Create a Website in Minutes https://www.squarespace.com/