When it comes to website design, there are so many different styles and directions in which your website can go: it can be anywhere from classy to minimalistic, from playful and vibrant to sleek and modern.
While your final look-and-feel should exude your personal style, line of work, and brand identity, there are a few ground rules that are always applicable.
Great web design feeds into your user experience and functionality, while being easy to understand at first glance. So in this article, you’ll find a collection of useful web design tips that will help your website achieve success – whether you want to implement them or ignore them in your quest for originality.
1. Website must be Responsive
In the era of handheld devices, you must ensure the proper accessibility in your website from all kind of mobile devices. Yes of course I’m talking about the local business website of yours and this is the first step that you have to guarantee in your business website. You must know that majority of the traffic is from mobile devices. So In this way, it’s necessary to superbly take into account the visitors who surf the web with their mobile phones. So along with the Mobilegeddon terms and conditions of Google is that every website needs to be responsive. And you must implement it when you’re in the verge of starting a website for your startup business.
2. K.I.S.S.
This is the abbreviation of “Keep it simple, stupid”, although other interpretations can also be found on the net. However, the word “simple” occurs in every variant, and that is exactly what web design is about.
It is easy to try to offer more and more options on your website. Be it many products on the niche website, many links in a blog, or the like. But that overwhelms the users and often a “too much” deterred rather than it helps. This also applies to forms; for example, the send rate increases if there are fewer input fields in the form.
So, don’t overload your website, but concentrate on the essential content and what visitors are looking for. The great example is Sand and Such.
3. Guide your user’s eyes with visual hierarchy.
If using a technical term like “negative space” didn’t phase you, what do you think of “visual hierarchy”? It refers to using different visual elements like size or placement to influence which elements your user sees first, second or last. Featuring a big, bold title at the top of the webpage and tiny legal information at the bottom is a good example of using visual hierarchy to prioritize certain elements over others.
Web design isn’t just about what you add to your website, but how you add it. Take CTA buttons; it’s not enough that they’re simply there; skilled designers place them deliberately and give them bold colors to stand out and suggestive text to encourage clicks. Elements like size, color, placement and negative space can all increase engagement—or decrease it.
4. Pay Attention To Site Load Times.
People are impatient when browsing websites and slow load times impact conversions (getting people to buy your products or services).
If your site design is graphically intense, you need to make sure you’ll have the hardware infrastructure and bandwidth to support the designs.
This is especially critical if you’re serving a large customer base and expect substantial traffic to your site. You can improve your site load times by picking good hosts.
The cheapest monthly hosting option does not typically offer the best value. It might be cheap but is also likely to be slow and unreliable.
Tip: want to compare how quickly two sites load in comparison to each other? Here’s a free tool you can use: whichloadsfaster.com
5. Site Navigation
People hate being confused. And the website navigation is often that aspect of the website, that seems visitors too “something” – too little / too much information, too intricate, to multi-step, and so on.
When building a website, make sure you adjust it in accordance with your interest. Navigate your visitors straight to the product or service you provide. Let us suppose that you are a consulting company – then you need to make sure your visitors can easily get in touch with, you placing contact forms or a chat button in a clearly displayed place. Meanwhile, a peculiarity of the navigation for an e-store is that most clicks must lead to a product page.
Remember, if a visitor went to your website then he is ready to make a purchase, so shorten his/her path with comprehensive navigation.
6. Prioritize Your Branding
When shopping online, you can probably relate to trusting established brands over faceless businesses. Customers want to trust the businesses they transact with, and if you look suspicious without the proper branding and brand awareness, then they won’t convert, ever.
To build trust, it all starts with your web design. Your branding is the most important element of your eCommerce business, showing who you are as a business, what it’s all about, and what makes you different from everyone else. It connects you with your audience, which drives sales!
7. Let Them Reach Out in Multiple Ways
In today’s digital age, most users don’t want to be redirected to a phone number or an email address when they reach your website. They want more immediate forms of communication with real people at the company.
According to a survey of American online consumers, roughly 68 percent engage in live chat on websites and another 63 percent prefer getting back to a website with live chat for a repeat purchase. It’s simple – consumers want convenience, and they build relationships with websites that offer it.
Live chat doesn’t need to be the only way people can get in contact with you via your website. Another smart idea is to offer links to your social media pages. Then, users can reach out on whatever platform they’re used to using, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram.
Above all else, consider what works best for your particular customer base on your website. Cater to their preferences when it comes to communication. This will build their confidence in both the brand and the website itself.
For example: Delta knows that customers like to reach out to airlines publicly via Twitter. Therefore, it has a link that says “Tweet Us” on the bottom of the homepage.
The brand continues to stay active on Twitter, since that’s where its customer base naturally communicates. What makes sense for one company might not for another, so consider your target audience and communication methods carefully.
8. Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps you connect to various servers across the world. The network allows you to serve various WP static files such as style sheets, images and JavaScript from these servers. Some of the most popular CDN service providers include Amazon Cloud Front, CloudFlare, and MaxCDN. All these providers are easy to configure and work seamlessly with a majority of available caching plugins.
9. Video content
A video is a powerful instrument that allows manipulating people emotions. Your visitors will be deeply moved by the combination of a certain story and music. What you need to make a video that affects the conversion rate is to know your audience’s interest. Create a video that raises important for your visitors’ matters. A video is the most efficient way to showcase products and demonstrate its awesomeness in action.
10. Neat whitespace
Some people believe that white space as it concerns web design is nothing more than “negative” space. The name means uselessness, and white space is not incompetent and is a better way to web designing.
White space, which is likewise connected to “negative” space, might certainly look like negative space, but it really performs a vital role in producing excellent user experience.
That white space within visuals, paragraphs, and sections is a crucial component of web design, as it saves the page from appearing congested, which is what it appears as if you put too much of graphics and texts in one space minus white space.
The content will be hard to see, which will typically expel visitors.
11. Ensure You Use High-Quality Images
Website owners will do almost anything to increase their conversion rate.
The good thing is that optimising your images can contribute significantly to improving search rankings, increase leads and generate traffic.
Pictures not only make your site attractive but also increase the visual experience as potential buyers view your products.
We often overlook the importance of having the right brand images.
The impact images have on a website can no longer be ignored.
By using larger images, Hyundai was able to score a 62% increase in test drive requests.
Mall.cz increased their conversions by close to 10% after adding larger images with the right descriptions.
A few web design tips can be used to improve the quality of images used:
- Add alt tags to your pictures. This will improve search rankings for your website.
- Have the right Image file names.
- Use images taken with the right angles to avoid false advertising.
- Upload small photos and give the option of viewing larger images.
- Decrease the file sizes of images.
- Use the right file type appropriately, JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
12. Typography
The content is the king, but you should not underestimate the impact of typography as part of the web design. Successful typography ensures that users can read a lot more and absorb information better.
The font size, for example, is always the subject of much discussion. There is no perfect size, but in many cases, the font size is chosen too small.
The most popular fonts for a blog post are:
Libre Franklin.
Alegreya Sans.
Rubik.
Spectral.
Lora.
Gentium Basic.
Arvo.
Fira Sans.
Also, other factors such as the font, color, etc. also affect the reading experience. Therefore, you should test and optimize the font on different devices.
13. Keep It Uncomplicate
Staying with the idea of less, this additionally pertains to your design overall. Research by Google has revealed that users don’t like visible complexity. The summary: the more complicated your design, the more limited it is regarded by visitors as impressive.
What does that suggest for your website? Besides the point above, here are a few Web Design Tips to keep things uncomplicated:
● Reconsider the sidebar
Websites are increasingly abandoning the sidebar in partiality of a single-column design. It involves fewer disturbances and places the center precisely on the content.
● Adhere to regular layouts
People prefer the ease and can get put-off by non-conventional website designs. Hence, it can be a useful approach to adhere to simple design layouts and tropes. You can, however, discover methods to stand out in other styles.
Wrapping Up
Web design applies to your website’s layout, fonts, user interface, images, background, videos, and other forms of graphic design. Using good graphic design promotes positive user experience, generates leads, and converts more visitors into customers. Your small business will thrive when you create a unique business logo, easy-to-find menu options, upload original and professionally-taken photographs, incorporate intuitive controls, and properly place CTAs. Make your small business successful by starting with great web design, and everything else will follo