It’s easier than ever to set up a website. Platforms like WordPress have an installation that sets up your website in a few minutes. However, that doesn’t mean you should stop there and launch your site from a fresh install.
You need a great web design if you want an effective website. Reports show that 75% of consumers consider web design essential to a company’s credibility. If you have a bad website design, you may lose customers.
Do you want to learn what designing a website that meets your customers’ needs takes? Continue reading the guide below to learn about the best web design elements and how to include them in your website’s design.
Simple Design
Nobody likes visiting a cluttered website. People go to websites to find information, not dig through navigation menus and sidebars.
Unfortunately, it’s easier than you think to create a cluttered design. You want to offer visitors as much information as possible, so you include everything possible on your pages.
You have to ask yourself this question: is a website element on a page useful for the visitor and gives them exactly what they need?
In most cases, the answer will be no. Keep your website layout and content simple to avoid overwhelming your visitors. When you do, people can quickly find what they need and better understand if your website can meet their needs.
Consistent Colors
In theory, adding a lot of color to a website sounds like a great idea. You can use colors to invoke emotion. Having a colorful website makes sense if you want to use different pages to invoke other feelings.
The problem is that this doesn’t work well for offering a consistent experience on your website. Your goal with your website design is to build a brand image, and you can’t do that if you have wild color schemes on all your website pages.
Most web designers stick with two primary colors on their sites. They have a primary color used on most website elements and a secondary color often used as an accent color.
Adding another color to the mix is possible, but it becomes a more significant challenge. The more colors you have, the harder it is to balance them on your website’s design.
Readable Typography
There are countless fonts in the world. Some of them are extremely simple, while others are complex. Complex typographies are the last thing you want to include in your website design.
The main goal of your website typography is to make it readable. Your visitors will be on various devices and have different reading abilities. Many complex typographies don’t look good on certain devices and will make it hard for people to consume information.
Try to stick with the common typographies on the web. The most common font family for the web is Open Sans. Some other common ones are Montserrat, Roboto, and Arial.
These fonts look great on every device and will make consuming content easier for your visitors.
Accessibility
You don’t only have great readers visiting your website these days. People who have vision problems, hearing issues, and other disabilities will also browse the web and visit your website.
You have to create an experience that appeals to people with those conditions. Luckily, many elements of web design will help with that process.
You can use the new HTML features to create content that people with assisted reading devices can use. Readable content means text-to-speech devices can correctly translate your content. You can also use image tags to tell people what images are on your site.
You can use many elements to help assisted reading devices translate the web, so research your options and add them to your website.
Page Speed
In an attempt to be as creative as possible with web design, many designers create complex designs with tons of images. Doing this isn’t an issue from a design perspective, and you can make unique experiences this way.
The problem comes when you add a ton of bloat to your website. All the images and website code you use will add to your website size. If someone is on a slow internet connection, they won’t be able to access your content quickly.
This is a problem when the average attention span of internet users is now eight seconds. You only have a limited amount of time to make your case. If your site takes too long to load, you’ll lose a lot of visitors.
Creating unique designs is fine, but you have to optimize your images and website code to reduce your page sizes. It shouldn’t take more than two seconds to load your site. Many modern designs do a great job of this and build sites that take less than a second to load.
This process is more straightforward if you use a platform like WordPress. Many plugins will optimize your images for you and compress your website code.
Google also offers tools that show you the things slowing your website. Their Pagespeed Insight tool will scan your website and tell you everything you need to know.
Responsiveness
You have more devices than ever connecting to the internet. The internet used to primarily consist of traffic from desktop computers. That made website design easier since you only had a few monitor sizes to deal with.
Things are much more complex now that over 62% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. If you offer a bad experience to people using small screens, you’ll lose much of your mobile traffic.
You can make your life easier and still engage in good web design by creating a responsive website. Instead of designing your site for desktop screens, you start by designing them for mobile.
You do this because it’s easier to add elements to a design than it is to remove them. As a result, you end up with a website design that looks great on every screen. Your website code will detect the screen size of your visitors and change the design to match those requirements.
Above-the-Fold Content
Hero images are one of the biggest web design trends in the past decade. It makes sense, too. They add a lot of visual flair to a website and can attract eyeballs.
The problem is that hero content doesn’t add much value to visitors. It’s a big image that takes up space and forces visitors to scroll down to read more content.
Since you have limited time to get someone’s attention, this can turn off many people. That means you’ll get a higher page bounce rate and lose potential customers.
People want to determine if your website can meet their needs as soon as possible. They’ll look at the content on the top of your pages to see if it resonates.
Putting informative content above the fold on your website makes more sense. Doing this means people can quickly figure out what your page is about and won’t bounce from your website to look for the answer elsewhere.
Call to Action
The chances are that you aren’t designing a website just for kicks. You’re doing it for a purpose: whether it’s to increase sales at a business or build a brand for yourself.
That means you don’t want people to visit your website and never return. You need a way to retain those visitors and make them followers of your business or brand.
One of the best ways to do this is to include a call to action on every page. People don’t always know what to do after reading content, so you need to tell them the next step to take.
Take doing web design for family lawyer, for instance. Your goal with a website in this industry is to increase the number of leads for a law firm. The best way to do this is to get someone on the phone and schedule an interview to sell them your service.
You do this with a website by making your contact form stand out. After informing your visitor about a problem, give them access to this form to contact the law firm for more information.
Don’t Forget to Include the Essential Web Design Elements in Your Design
Given your website design’s importance to people’s first impression of your business, you can’t afford to offer a bad experience. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done to get things right.
Luckily, there are well-documented web design elements that you can use to create fantastic web designs. Remember to include the elements above in your new design to ensure you provide a great experience to your visitors.
Check out the blog for more helpful guides that will help you in other situations.
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