Website Design Analysis

Although the variations among web designs is nearly infinite, there are definite themes and styles of designs, particularly within a market-niche. The Apparel and Fashion industries have distinctive styles, and this analysis project aims to discover and name the categories of design styles. The goal of the project is to make it easier to apparel vendors and retailers to determine what web design will work best for them and give them a language to communicate their design preferences to web designers.

This design analysis started by analyzing, describing and grouping several hundred apparel vendor and boutique retailer websites to produce this high level set of categories of variance among designs:

• Overall Style is the general "feel" of the site such as Retro, Street or Easter Candy.
• Structure is the way content is organized on the page, such as Columns, Foyer, or Free Form.
• Color Tone describes the major color of the page, usually the color of the background or whitespace.
• Pallet describes the set of colors on a page, including the background color, font colors and accent colors.
• Art describes wether the site uses [Photographs], general [Graphics] or [Sketches].
• Other Elements include smaller components like [Drips and Splatter], [Crests] or [Colleges].

Many sites that have a common purpose have similar styles, or a small set of similar styles, such as:

• Surf shops
• [Skate shops]

There is a long list of Feminine Web Designers.

One well known designer, Robin Williams, describes some other components that make web designs distinctive.

What are the distinctive features that create the style?

For instance, what kind of typefaces do they use in body copy, what size of type, what are the line lengths for body copy, what is the ratio of image to text, what kinds of typefaces are used in headlines or graphic text, what kinds of images are used (people photos, abstract images, collages, upscale illustrations, etc), how are the images used (text wraps around images, backgrounds, tilted, overlapped, etc.), how much white space is left, what kind of backgrounds are used, how much Flash is used, how prevalent are DHTML menus, what sort of navigation do they use, and on and on.