An excellent website design should achieve its objective by delivering its specific message and engaging the visitor. A good website design incorporates several elements such as consistency, color, typography, imagery, simplicity, and functionality.
Many important factors influence how a website is perceived when it is designed. A well-designed website can help to build trust and encourage visitors to take action. Ensure that your website design is user-friendly (shape and aesthetics) and how simple it is to use are all factors in generating a positive user experience (functionality).
Here are a few examples: to consider when planning your next web project：
1. Website Purpose
Your website must cater to the user’s requirements. On all pages, having a simple, clear intention will help the user interact with what you have to offer. What is your website’s purpose? Are you submitting helpful information, such as a “How to” guide? Is it an entertainment website, such as a sports website, or are you providing a product to the user? Websites can fulfill a variety of functions, but there are several that are universal.
a) Expertise in Describing
b) Establishing Your Reputation
c) Creating Leads
d) Sales and After-Sales Service
2. Simplicity
Simplifying your website’s user experience and usability is the greatest approach to proceed. The following are some design strategies for achieving simplicity.
Colour: Colour can express messages that elicit emotional responses. Finding a color palette that works for your brand will allow you to influence your customers’ behavior. Keep the color palette to no more than five hues. Colors that complement each other work exceptionally well. Colour schemes that are pleasant to the eye increase customer engagement and make the user feel good.
Typography: Typography is an essential aspect of your website. It catches the eye and acts as a visual reflection of this trademark’s sounds. The typefaces used on the website should be legible, and no more than three types should be used.
Imagery: The term imagery refers to any visual feature employed in communication. Still, all kinds of photography, illustration, video, and graphics are featured. All pictures should be dynamic, represent the company’s spirit, and embody the brand’s personality. Most of the information we consume on websites is visual. As a first impression, it is critical to use high-quality images to create a competent and credible impression in the minds of visitors.
3. Navigation
The website navigation system allows visitors to interact and find what they are looking for. The ability to navigate a website is critical to retaining visitors. If your website’s navigation is tough to understand, visitors will leave. Therefore, it is essential to keep navigation simple, intuitive, and consistent across all pages.
4. Visual Hierarchy
A visual hierarchy is the grouping of things in descending order of importance. This is accomplished by the use of size, color, images, contrast, typeface, whitespace, texture, and style. One of the most important visual hierarchy tasks is constructing a focal point that shows visitors where the most relevant information is.
5. Content
A good website has both the design and the content are excellent. Using appealing language and great content, the website may attract and influence visitors, transforming them into buyers.
6. Grid-Based Layout
Grids help structure your design and organize your content—the grid assists in aligning and keeping elements on the page clean. The grid-based layout contains content in a clean rigid grid structure with columns and portions that align and feel balanced, imposing order, resulting in an aesthetically pleasing website.
7. Load Time
Visitors will leave if they must wait for a website to load. Nearly half of web visitors expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they will abandon it if it does not load in three seconds. Image optimization will help your site load faster.
8. Mobile Friendly
Many people are increasingly using their mobile to access the internet or other mobile devices. Therefore, it is critical to consider building your website with a responsive layout that can adjust to different screen sizes.
When optimizing your website for mobile, you may need to use a different layout than you do for desktop. This is demonstrated in the mobile-friendly version of the preceding example. They specifically used a full-screen image and grid design to improve the mobile experience. Again, this illustrates why it is critical to treat mobile and web design as distinct entities.
Taking these design principles on board does not make you a rule follower. Instead, it simply ensures you have a solid foundation to take risks and experiment where it matters.
How to Use Web Design Principles in Your Projects
It can be overwhelming to learn about so many principles and guidelines. So here are some examples of how to use them:
Maintain Your Knowledge of Best Practices
It would help if you continued studying and educating yourself on UX design best practices. Learn from existing web-related solutions. Begin your projects with a research or inspiration phase to learn more about the subject. Your users’ needs and gather quality references from which to learn.
Use Cautious When Applying Principles
Because each project is unique, it will benefit from different design principles. You’ll need to prioritize which ones will be most useful to you for each website you build. Keep in mind the site’s main functionality, primary user flows, and corresponding business goals.
Test and Improve Your Designs Regularly
You must test your website with as many real target users as possible. If this is not possible, you can seek assistance from and test with coworkers, clients, and even your co-designers to gather relevant feedback about the usability of your website.
At this point, you’re not searching for excellence. Nothing is perfect from the beginning, therefore don’t be scared to refine and improve your design. based on user feedback.
Practice Makes Perfect
As you practice, you’ll find yourself applying design principles almost subconsciously. The more you plan for usability, the easier it should be to generate effective solutions and avoid problems.
Understand the Fundamentals, Form Your Style
Rules are intended to make processes more accessible but should not be followed. However, you will often be able to break the rules if you fully understand their purpose successfully.
These design principles serve as a starting point for you to experiment with and develop your distinct style. Once you’ve mastered them, you can produce extraordinarily successful design solutions by purposefully breaking them.
Conclusion
To create professional, user-friendly websites, you must understand fundamental design principles and apply them wisely in your work. This will assist you in improving your designs by making them more appealing, easier to use, and, most importantly, profitable.