5 Principles of a Good Web Design You Need to Know
The secret lies in familiarizing yourself with the principles of good web design. These are the values to have in mind and practices to implement when structuring your website.
Here are five principles of a good web design that you need to know:
1. Innovation beyond distraction
A website that impresses is a product of a professional who has a knack for creativity and is highly innovative.In essence, it is the work of a person who knows how to use graphic elements, texts, and images to sell the ideas of a brand. And in an effort to do so, avoids diverting the visitor’s attention to sections that bear no value to both the user and the business.
As an innovative web designer, always strive to structure your sites in a way that engages the visitor both by feel and look. Use elements that easily catch the eye and at the same time effectively help to explain the ideas your brand wants to relay.
Likewise, use colors, themes, and fonts that spark the emotions you expect your products or services to trigger in your visitor’s mind. Most importantly, avoid designs that are too ad-oriented or those that trick the visitor into making purchases before they can understand their benefits.
2. Simplicity
The truth is, over-designing the website kills its purpose.The excess web elements tend to distract the visitors and this delays their conversion into customers. A good principle is to keep things simple and neat. With that, you’ll be improving navigation within a page and to other complementary parts of your site.
A simple design also means your website is using just the right number of web elements to communicate its ideas. In turn, this reduces the time various browsers that your visitors are using take to load content. And as you probably know, having a slow loading site is one of the surest ways of losing potential clients.
Very few web visitors today have the patience to wait for a site that loads for more than three seconds – most will simply bounce back and head to your competitor to find the information or service they were looking for in your business.
Of course, many other factors come into play when looking to speed up a site including how well you optimize your images and your choice of hosting provider. If you’re looking for a good host, you can find a decent review that was written recently by Hosting Foundry. Improve your site’s user experience by transferring it to a quicker and more reliable host today.
3. Compatibility
With technological advancement giving rise to devices with varied features, sizes, and specifications, it’s incredibly important that your website supports all platforms.A good web designer goes for web elements that offer an optimal balance between the visual appearance and the functionality of the site. Put otherwise, your design must take into consideration all the vectors that affect content access. These include the font type, color of elements, size of objects, site themes, and plugins to name just a few.
Ensure that your website offers the same level of responsiveness irrespective of the device that accesses it. Use web elements that adapt to various screen sizes without losing the important sections of your site. And remember compatibility affects the readability of your content even when it’s optimized for search engines.
4. Communication
If you are like most businesses, the reason you’re putting up a website is to promote or sell your ideas or products to a particular audience.To do this effectively, you need to create and relay your information clearly. Structure your content in a design that engages, convinces, and ultimately converts your audience into buying and loyal fans.
Mastering the concept of communication in web design helps you sell your ideas quickly and saves the resources and time you’d otherwise dedicate to extra marketing and promotion. A few basic rules of effective communication when creating your site’s content include:
- Using enticing headlines and subtitles especially for your blog posts
- Avoiding a lot of industry jargon
- Adding media items like images, GIFs, and videos in your content for increased engagement
5. Usability
Visitors realize the purpose of your website when you make it easy to use.A usable website works decently on any browser, displays information correctly, and navigation through its content is seamless. So, how do web designers apply the usability principle?
First, ensure that all your inbound and outbound links are all working correctly. Also, place your call-to-action buttons in strategic places so that interested prospects can convert easily. In addition, test all the web elements on multiple platforms to ensure they display well.
As a bonus, structure the content such that within the first few scrolls, visitors are already curious to try your brand. Use industry-specific colors, images, and phrases that your audience can relate to. Above all, emphasize the subject matter more than anything else to capture your visitor’s interest right from the moment they start reading your content.
How are you setting yourself apart from the pack in your web design work? We’d love to hear your feedback!