A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Website
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ll know that I’m a big fan of simplicity, usability and removing web clutter.
I recently read A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home at Zen Habits and it had quite an effect on me — and others too, if 2399 Diggs are anything to go by. There are clearly a number of strong benefits to simplicity in the home, but what about simplicity on the web?
This question got me thinking about the benefits of approaching our blogs, websites and content with a minimalist mindset. What follows will be a complete guide to creating a minimalist website. The guide is broken up into individual elements.
Complete minimalism isn’t for everyone but I hope you’ll consider each element individually and on its own merits. There may be just one or two minimalist things you could do to imbue your website with a little more simplicity and clarity.
What is minimalism?
For some, minimalism recalls images of white rooms with no color or features. In other words, reduction for its own case. Its correct meaning refers to the art movement of the same name, but it’s often used colloquially to “designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials.”
It’s this colloquial meaning which I’m discussing here. For me, minimalism means:
“… subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.” [Source] / removing any elements or words which do not support your content’s raison d’être / merging aesthetics and functionality / “… consciously choosing to have fewer things, but knowing that what you do have will be of high quality and truly worth cherishing.” [Source] / focusing on what is essential.
What are the advantages of web minimalism?
Most websites and blogs are filled with noise. Extraneous images, widgets, flashing advertisements and waffling text can be seen everywhere. In comparison, websites which focus on clarity and essential features can seem like zen gardens. They provide a refreshing break from the rest of the web and your readers will appreciate this sense of calm.
More importantly, stripping down your website will give more focus and strength to the things you want visitors to interact with most of all: its content, and other vital features.
The elements of simplicity
Saying more in less words. A refreshing minimalist design will not count for much if your content is puffy and bloated. Muhammad Saleem has given some excellent advice on communicating more meaning in less words.
The advantages of saying more in less words is that it increases clarity while decreasing the time investment needed to extract meaning from your content. This will add extra value to everything you write.
See it: [Copyblogger and The Laws of Simplicity]
. . .
Greater focus on content. A minimalist design means there is less to distract readers from interacting with your content. A minimalist design can also mean you need to do less work to make your text look visually interesting. If your website is covered in images and other high-intensity items then text will inevitably look bland in comparison. If the opposite tack is taken and the text is allowed to speak for itself the result can be quite elegant.
See it: [Daring Fireball, kottke.org and JustinBlanton.com]
. . .
Merging aesthetics and functionality. Most websites do both separately, housing content and navigational elements inside images and color arrangements which serve no other purpose than to be pretty.
Minimalist websites, however, do both at the same time, often allowing content and navigational elements to enter the realm of the aesthetic. This can be achieved by using text and fonts to create visual interest, or by using images as navigational elements. Text can also be used to create color and shape.
These approaches ensure visual elements don’t distract from your site’s essentials because they are your site’s essentials.
See it: [Huddle Together, Happy Cog, Bokardo and Readme.cc]
. . .
Make use of whitespace. The empty areas of your screen are called ‘whitespace’. Whitespace is often treated like a space waiting to be filled, or as wasted space. This is not so at all: after all, why do you think the pages of most books have such big margins?
White space helps to frame the elements on the page and focus our eyes. It also prevents the page from becoming so busy that our eyes find it difficult to navigate.
A note: whitespace does not have to be white!
See it: [Airbag Industries, JeremyBoles.com, Design Notes]
. . .
Make graphics useful. If you like graphics and want to use many of them, make sure most are useful beyond aesthetics. Use them to represent something, to link somewhere, or to help your visitors interact with your site. Graphics for their own sake can distract from the central message of your content.
See it: [Extratasty, Mark Bixby]
. . .
Make your content tall. A thinner header image allows more of your content to be seen in the first screen impression of your website. This can help to draw in new visitors to your site straight away, and increase the visual strength of your content.
See it: [Seth's Blog, Paul Stamatiou's Blog, kottke.org, JustinBlanton.com]
. . .
Declutter. The most important element of a minimalist website is that it be free of clutter. I’ve written 50 tips on removing clutter from your website which should give you some pointers on where to start.
Visitors do not come to your site for pretty widgets and bells and whistles. They come for the content and the essentials of any website: the comments, an about page, a contact page, archives, categories, RSS link, and a few other creative things. Removing unnecessary elements will increase the strength and potency of what’s important.
See it: [37signals, Coding Horror, Webreakstuff]
Some inspiration
Here is a list of 10 minimalist blogs and 27 minimalist websites I drew on for some of the above examples. I also recommend A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home, which inspired this post. It explains in more detail some of the benefits and principles of minimalism, and this post is respectfully named after it.
I’m going to have to try this out. I’ve been realizing more and more that having a thin top header is very important in terms of bringing your content to the top, you should also have integrated search into the header.
I loved the advice in your other post about how so many widgets are for the blog owner, not for the readers. That has changed the way I think.
Oh, you might want to mention heat maps + crazy egg as a great way to help you minimize the clutter on your site since it will show you what people are really clicking on.
Hey Engtech, the heat maps / crazy egg idea is a great one. I know I called this a ‘complete’ guide but I’m starting to think a follow-up post is in order, and I will definitely include your suggestion. Heat maps would be a really useful way to determine what readers are interacting with and what is just clutter.
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Right on re minimalism. I weary of all the clutter.
I’m using simple video-without-a-camera (and no talking head either - I’m not that pretty!) to simplify my blog, Qlippin’ On, using some new free software that some guys and I wrote called QlipBoard. It takes me about 5 min to make a compelling video that a reader can explore with a click, if they want. It lets me write less and say more in less time, and folks seem to like it.
Kudos to you for a well researched article, Skellie! Your blog is in itself evidence of minimalism at its best :D
@ Chris: I guess video posts could be very minimalist… they do without text all-together!
@ Pablo: Thanks! I was pretty fortunate to stumble across such a nice Wordpress theme. I’m actually using another computer at the moment and, would you believe it, I’ve never seen the blog display higher than 1024×768 (until now). I’m actually pretty pleased with how minimalist it is. The added whitespace around the sides is really nice at that resolution.
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‘Saying more in less words’ is something I need to work on - thanks for the link, that Copyblogger article was good.
I love how you’ve used images for popular posts links, it really covers that aesthetics aspect.
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I (and others) argue that minimalism isn’t what most people think it is at all. Rather than being pure utility stripped of ornament, minimalism is, in fact, a stylistic movement that expresses an emotional and spiritual philosophy of hope and progress for the future based on technology and industrial production. It fetishizes whitespace, hard edges, and sans-serif fonts just as much as the baroque fetishizes gold leaf, curlicues, angels and putti. It adores cleanness and sparseness not because these things are empirically more efficient (because 9 times out of 10 they just aren’t — would switching to Times New Roman make this page any less usable?), but because these styles are evocative of futuristic dreams and aspirations. Minimalism advocates want to live in a minimalist house not because detail and ornament distract one from getting things done, but because such an environment makes you *feel* like you are efficient and modern, that you are different (improved!) from how people lived in the past. It is an aesthetic of rebellion and difference, as well.
To say that minimalism is “beyond aesthetics” is just wrong. Minimalism is an aesthetic, a profound one. To not have an aesthetic is simply to be nihilist and random, not minimalist.
Note that I am not saying minimalism is bad. It’s awesome. But it most certainly is a style ripe with meaning and symbolism.
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Excellent guide, as always. You already linked our site from other articles, but here we go with another link to our minimalist web design article.
Kind Regards,
Marko
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