8 Top Principles for Great Website Design
A Curated List of Top Principles for Great Website Design
The success of any website entirely depends on how its web design is. Whether the designers have taken the utmost care or not while developing it. Your nicely-designed site which includes usability and utility determines the success and not the visual design. Since your site is the face of your business and most potential customers will visit it before they ever look in on your store, it becomes inevitable to get your website designed cautiously. Lacking in any aspect could end up demolishing your brand impression.
Web page design is more critical for conversions than you think. Despite using an excellent conversion boosting tactic, you may not do much if it looks poor in quality. In fact, website design doesn’t necessarily mean how it looks and feels but is how it works. Even a simple-looking website with exceptional usability and well-structured typically performs amazingly on Google. User views of such websites are also higher than those with poor user experience. The performance entirely depends on the effectiveness of the website.
So, How to Design a Good Website?
Good to great website design needs a wide range of professionals having expertise in different areas. Their collective efforts need to be put in when there is a critical decision to take place. Here in this article, I’ll outline the 8 essential principles of a great website design that must be pondered while developing a website. These design principles will definitely help web designers to develop awe-inspiring designs and to enhance the usability of a website.
Here is the list of 8-great design principles which will make your website aesthetic, user-friendly, effective, and engaging:
1. Simple Is the Best
The over-designed website may not work. Putting too many elements on the page may lead to distracting visitors from the main purpose of your website. Simplicity always works in an effective web page design. The clean and fresh design of your website not only makes the website appealing but also helps the user to navigate from one page to another seamlessly. Loading a website having design features that do not serve the purpose may be frustrating. Keep your design as simple as possible so that the visitors can feel it easy-to-use and can find their way easily.
2. Consistency
Consistency in website design matter a lot. Give your attention to matching design elements throughout each of the pages. It can be understood that your fonts, sizes, headings, sub-headings, and button styles must be the same throughout the website. Plan everything in advance. Finalize the fonts and the right colors for your texts, buttons, etc, and stick to them throughout the development. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) would come in handy to keep the complete information about design styles and elements.
3. Typography & Readability
No matter how good your design is text still rules the website as it provides users with the desired information. Since search engine crawlers are very much familiar with this data, it becomes an integral part of SEO activities. You should keep your typography visually appealing and readable for visitors, along with the tricky use of keywords, meta-data, and other SEO-sensitive elements.
Consider using fonts that are easier to read. Modern sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, etc. can be used for the body texts. Make proper combinations of typefaces for each and every design element such as headlines, body texts, buttons, etc.
4. Responsive Web Design
Keeping in mind the ever-growing usage of smartphones, tablets, and phablets, web design must be effective for various screens. If your website design doesn’t support all screen sizes, the chance is that you’ll lose the battle with your competitors. There are a number of web design studios or service points from where you can turn your desktop design into a responsive and adaptive one for all screen sizes.
5. Color Palette and Imagery
A perfect color combination attracts users while a poor combination can lead to distraction. This necessitates you to pick a perfect color palette for your website which can create a pleasing atmosphere, leaving a good impact on visitors. Enhance users’ experience by selecting a complementary color palette to give a balanced look to your website design. Remember to use white spaces as they avoid your website from visual clutter and mess. Also, avoid using too many colors. 3 or 4 tones for the whole website are good enough to give an appealing, clear, and minimal design. The same is the case with images. Don’t use multiple vibrant images.
6. Easy Loading
No one likes a website that takes too much time to load. So take care of it by optimizing image sizes and combing code into a central CSS or JavaScript file as it reduces HTTP requests. Also, compress HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for enhanced loading speed.
7. Easy Navigation
Study shows that visitors stay more time on websites having easy navigation. For effective navigation, you may consider creating a logical page hierarchy, using bread scrums, and designing clickable buttons. You should follow the “three-click rule” so that visitors can get the required information within three clicks.
8. Communication
The ultimate purpose of the visitors is to get information, and if your website is able to communicate with your visitors efficiently, most probably they would spend more time on your website. Tricks that may work to establish effortless communication with the visitors are – organizing information by making good use of headlines and sub-headlines and using bullet points, rather than long gusty sentences.
Conclusion
Keeping the aforementioned principles of good website design, you can easily develop an aesthetic and functional website. Without this base, it would be difficult to travel a long path. Only with a clean and user-friendly design, you can think to succeed.
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