A website with a good design is able to support a business’s branding goals and is able to convey the brand’s messaging in an appropriate manner. Such websites can engage visitors well and can motivate them to visit again and again. Good website design depends on certain proven web design principles that combine several factors including imagery, typography, colors, consistency, functionality, and simplicity. Websites that are created using tried-and-tested web design guidelines perform better than the ones that are designed without any rules and considerations. In this article, we have discussed some basic web design principles as well as some special considerations that would help you develop a high-performance website.
12 Important Website Design Principles and Tips
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The Purpose
Your website should address the needs of your target audience. When you let your customers know about your intention and purpose, you will be able to develop a website that would appeal to your customers. So what purpose your website is to supposed to serve? Are you looking to entertain your audience? Do you want to sell products to your customers? Are you looking to provide information to your customers in the form of a How-To guide? Whatever your purpose may be, your common goals remain the same. For example, your website should highlight your expertise, help you establish a strong reputation in the market, help you generate leads and sales, and maintain a rapport with your customers through effective customer service.
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Simplistic Appeal
Websites having simplistic designs guarantee positive user experience as they can enhance usability and easy navigation. You should use appropriate colors in order to set up your brand’s character and to spark the desired emotional responses of your customers. It is a good idea to limit the number of colors to 5. You may use complementary colors , in fact, soothing color combinations improve customer engagement. You should use appropriate typefaces in order to boost the visual appeal of your website. Ideally, you should use a maximum of 3 font styles in your website. The imagery that you use should reflect your brand’s character. The imagery may include illustration, photography, video, or any other types of graphics. Visuals tell a thousand words and create the first impression and impact. So you should focus on using the right and high-quality visuals in order to be able attract the attention of your target audience and establish a professional identity.
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Navigation
Your website’s navigation should be such that visitors are able to move freely from one web page to the other without any hindrance. Confusing website navigation will not allow customers to find what they look for and this would lead to fewer page visits ultimately.
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Visual Hierarchy
You should rank content based on the order of their significance. You can set up this order by highlighting text and visuals through color, style, size, texture, imagery, typography, white space, etc. In other terms, you should set up a focal point in order to let viewers know how important a certain piece of information is.
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Content
A great website has great textual content. You can hire the services of professional copywriters who would make sure that they provide you with well-written content that’s appropriate in terms of grammar and rich in terms of vocabulary.
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Layout based on grid
When you use a grid-based design, your content would look more organized. The grid allows for proper alignment of the elements and instills a balanced look in the website, thereby promoting aesthetics.
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Website Load Time
Research indicates that visitors prefer to visit websites that take just two seconds to load. In fact, Google also determines page rank based on website load time. If your website takes a lot of time to get loaded, you will end up losing website traffic. The use of images or videos of large sizes contributes to an increased load time and so you should focus on image size optimization so as to be able to reduce the load time.
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Mobile-Friendliness
Today, people use their smartphones or other handheld devices to access the net and to browse through websites. So you should create a website having responsive design, which would make your website accessible across diverse platforms and devices having different screen-sizes.
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Consistency
Consistency counts when it comes to web design. The design elements in every page should follow a pattern and should match each other. The headings, fonts, sub-headings, and button styles that you use should remain consistent at all the pages. Once you decide on the style and colors for the text and buttons, you should stick to the set patterns. You may find Cascading Style Sheets to be immensely helpful in this aspect
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Typography
Websites with great designs feature great typography that promotes easy readability. Website text is recognized by search engine crawlers, which is why text is a crucial part of SEO efforts. Choose typography in such a manner that visitors enjoy reading through the information that you provide. Your text should also be based on a proper selection of meta data, keywords, and other SEO-specific elements. Choose easy-to-read fonts. Arial, Helvetica, and other San seriff fonts can be applied in the body texts. Choose appropriate typefaces for buttons, body texts, and headlines.
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Colors
An optimal color combination can create a great visual appeal whereas a poor combination leads to loss of appeal and reputation. So you should choose an appropriate color palette so as to make sure that you create an ambient environment for visitors and create a strong, long-lasting impact. While using colors and imagery throughout your website, you should make sure to leave white spaces in appropriate sections in order to prevent clutter. Keep colors and images to an optimal number. Excessive use of visuals may promote messiness.
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Communication
Your ultimate goal is to establish communication with your customers through your website. With a well-designed website, you are able to establish communication with your customers in an effortless manner, which would make your visitors spend more time in your website. Some of the ways to boost communication with your customers include the use of attractive headings and sub-headings and use of bullet points to keep your information precise and concise.
To conclude
So, what makes a good website at the end of the day? Well, it’s a combination of art, science, and thorough market research that would produce a good website. There are several reputed web design companies that provide world-class web design services, thereby allowing businesses to revamp their existing websites or to design a whole new website. Such companies employ experienced web designers who work closely with their clients to understand their branding philosophy and to develop designs that reflect their branding messages appropriately.