What is precedence? Open a magazine page. Any page.
What’s the first thing you see? What’s the second ? Ask yourself, why you tend to look at things in a certain order. What are the elements leading your eyes across the page and how do you use web design techniques and skills to manipulate your visitor’s eyes and senses?

Precedence is probably the most important facet of information design. Once you master control of your visitor’s eyes roaming habits you can send clear messages and get your information across.  Here are a few tips on how to get the job done:

1. Size – lesson one was learned somewhere in those first years of primary school. You wrote an essay and gave it a title. Your title text was bigger than the rest of your essay. Did you think about it or did it simply come naturally? Bigger things get noticed faster, that’s just the way life is. Make sure the most important texts in your website, including your logo or slogan are treated as such and are written in a bigger font than sub-titles and sub-headers.
2. Color – colors are also an obvious element involved in precedence and web design. The brighter the color the better. Of course if you give every other element on your page a different bright color you may be missing the point. Use coloring wisely to lead your visitor’s eyes where you want them. Leave most of the text either in black & white or in a faded gray and then add a splash of color in those exact places you want to emphasize. Start with a minimalistic design at first to see this work in full power and then start playing with the quantities.
3. Background Color – everything in life is relative and that includes colors. As with regular color, it’s not so much what color you use, but the color in relation to the rest of the colors in the website. Choose a background color that will act in contrast with the elements you want to emphasize on your page. To simplify this idea, imagine that your background color is a dark gray, and while there are many different elements on the page in varying colors, three words appear somewhere on your page in white. Obviously, those words are going to jump out at you.  Keep that in mind.
4. Positioning – Studies show that most Westerners’ eyes (those who read languages from left to right) will automatically roam to the top left hand side of a page. Different studies disagree on the exact motion of the eye. Whether it starts from the top left and goes to the top right and then downwards, or perhaps the motion from top to bottom is different or rounder. However, all agree that placement is crucial and elements placed higher up on the page will receive higher precedence. Use this to your advantage.
5. Spacing – As the previous post clearly emphasized, spacing is a major part of precedence. Increase the spacing between sentences and you will draw the eye towards the sentence.  There was a time when tiny font was really popular – no longer thank god. Web designers all over have come to the realization that texts are meant to be read and not just stared at. So save your readers that extra run to get their reading glasses and make sure your using legible fonts.

Read also:
5 Tips for Page Division and Web Design
Designing a Website from Head to Toe with Free Flash Templates

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