10 Website Design Principles for Successful Website
A good website is about finding the perfect balance between creativity and functionality while following a handful of . A well-designed website is the key to building trust and making an impact on users. To achieve such synergy of usability and aesthetics, designers need to comprehend the fundamental principles of web design.
Here is a list of website design principles you should consider when making your website, providing key factors contributing to a successful website.
Elevate Your Website with These 10 Website Design Principles
What Is Web Design?
Web design refers to creating websites and pages that reflect the company or brand image, vision and value on a digital plane. This process involves the placement of graphics and content across a group of pages.
Web design mainly focuses on designing websites for desktop browsers. However, since the 2010s, as mobile devices rose in popularity, designers integrated the website to become mobile-friendly.
What Are Website Design Principles?
They are the fundamental guidelines that all web designers aim to follow to make a good website. This guideline has ten main points.
Visual Hierarchy and Layout
Visual hierarchy is the web design principle that refers to how elements like buttons and content are arranged on a website. Having a good visual hierarchy means creating a well-thought-out structure to make it easy to navigate and follow.
Visual hierarchy helps guide viewers through what they need to see first to avoid getting overwhelmed with all the content and elements. And their eyes will be drawn to the elements in the exact order they were meant to view.
Components of Visual Hierarchy
- Size: It matters because people then look at the bigger picture. Knowing that designers often make the point they want to be looked at bigger than the rest.
- Color and tint: Bright colors are strategically used to catch the eye of viewers.
- Whitespace: Designers use the space around elements to highlight key aspects and guide readers’ attention accordingly.
- Proximity: Arranging items close together in a design to emphasize their relation. This helps users know where to look next.
- Texture: The designer implements rich textures to enhance the visual prominence and significance of the page design.
- Contrast: Along with texture, contrasting colors let the designers come up with visually striking to be more eye-catching to the users.
- Alignment: Designers use it to tell the users the sequence they need to follow to comprehend the website.
Tips For Creating An Effective Visual Hierarchy
- Sometimes less is more: While intricate fonts can attract more attention, avoid overdoing it to the point of distracting and reducing the readability of other elements.
- Make it accessible: Some visual elements may look good on a desktop browser but can be messy on the mobile version. Keep in mind that more people spend time on their mobile devices than their computers.
- Focus on the purpose: Whether for promoting, or branding, always remind yourself of the reasons for this website.
Examples Of Good Visual Layout
Content Focused Layout
Medium is a website for bloggers, writers, or people who want to share their stories, news or information.
Full-Screen Layout
Species in Pieces is an example if you want to make an ideal website for presentation or storytelling. As the name suggests, a full-screen layout fits on a single screen without needing to scroll.
Card-Based Layout
This layout mainly focuses on showcasing the various items, perfect for any business with many products. Asos’s website acts as a store and a showroom for clothing items.
Responsive Design
Responsive design in website design principles is how a website interface can actively adapt to various device layouts.
Responsiveness is achievable because of media queries. It enables the design to instantly change the browser space to maintain content consistency across devices. In addition, the design components are scaled in relative units.
Why Is Responsive Important?
In this digital age, your website must work seamlessly across all platforms, not just desktop browsers. Creating a website just for PC users is impossible with the growing number of mobile device users.
Mobile responsiveness is necessary for delivering excellent user experience (UX) and SEO (search engine optimization). A responsive website that works on any device will help businesses reach a wider audience and improve their presence.
Optimization Tips And Best Practices For Responsive Design
Responsive is not just all about the looks, it is also about how the website works and feels. Adapting and adjusting the website to make it run faster and smoother is vital as it will impact the user experience.
Conditional Loading
Some elements are not designed for mobile or worth displaying on the website. We want the mobile version to be concise and basic, so hiding elements is necessary.
On that note, We should ensure that we are not wasting bandwidth and browser resources by loading everything on the website. The trick is to load these elements on certain conditions, such as hovering over or clicking directly on them.
Lazy loading of Non-vital Videos And Images
Visual elements like images and videos make up a big part of the total download size of a website. However, it would take a while to load everything on the website. Lazy loading is the process of delayed loading of the non-essential, heavy elements. There are two cases where the rendering of media is delayable:
- Render-blocking media should load after the content and layout.
- Below-the-fold content loads as the user scrolls below the fold
- Responsive Images: Some devices have better display quality than others, causing photographs to become blurry if not exported at the correct resolution. Depending on the resolution, images may need to be double (@2x), triple (@3x), or even quadruple (@4x) the size.
Therefore, when making a responsive website, you should pay close attention to these factors to maximize its effectiveness.
Navigation
Another crucial factor in website design principles, navigation lays the foundation to make your website operate properly. It directs the user to the appropriate location to obtain what they want.
Consistency Is Key
Providing a navigation bar, also known as a menu bar helping users to go wherever they want on your website is vital. A menu bar is an element which consists of all the links to different pages on your website.
Setting in a fixed location on the website will save the user the hassle of scrambling to navigate to another page. On the other hand, having the menu bar in different places on different areas of the site will confuse the user, leading to a bad user experience.
Though it might seem to be a no-brainer, people tend to overlook it causing disorientation for users. The navigation bar needs to be straightforward, clear and easy on the eye.
Eye Catching Not Overwhelming
Ensure that your navigation visually stands out from the rest of the page’s content. Ideally, whether in form, height, or color the navigation bar should be not only constant from page to page but also high contrast to stick out at a glance.
This is especially crucial from an accessibility standpoint, because someone with limited vision or is visually impaired will rely significantly on a consistent, obvious navigation pattern throughout your website.
In addition, you should avoid hindering the visibility of your navigation bar by hiding it. In recent trends, websites have set their menu bar in a fixed place no matter how far down the user scrolls.
User Experience – Website Design Principles
User Experience (aka UX) refers to the level of engagement between users and your website. Factors such as visibility, functionality, and ease of use can contribute to the overall UX of the site. The better the UX, the more traffic you will potentially get.
To achieve the ultimate user experience, the only thing you need to focus on is the users. You need to understand your user inside and out. To do this you will need to:
Design user scenarios: put yourself in the user’s perspective and imagine realistic situations where the user interacts with your website. Where they click, and how long they spend on certain pages can provide crucial information.
Here are some examples of good UX design
Nike
The clean, slick, white, minimalist background complements the product design and homepage. The website acts like a listing page and an online e-commerce site. Along with various functional buttons across the site helps users to easily navigate around the page.
In addition, all the product categories are listed on the drop-down menu bar, giving customers a better time looking for their suitable needs.
This brand applies a visual drop-down menu to guide users to explore their car models. Imagine this site as a virtual showroom, it provides information about the cars along with a view of each model, and what it has to offer.
Unlike other industries, the beverages industry, especially alcohol vendors, has to deal with a unique UX challenge: verifying the visitor’s age while ensuring a seamless UX. After verifying their age, the users will be presented with a modern, sleek landing page showcasing the brand’s products.
Hacienda Tequila provides a high-end brand experience thanks to the perfect blend of elegant design, intuitive navigation and informative content.
Accessibility
Web accessibility means making your site accessible to all kinds of people regardless. Back then, accessibility was often referred to as helping people with disabilities or impairments use the website effortlessly.
However, in a modern context, it also means creating a page accessible for users from different groups including mobile users and those with slow internet connections. Essentially, accessibility is treating all users equally.
Designing an accessible website is one of the top priorities in website design principles. It proves to have various benefits to your brand:
- Demonstrate your care, good morals and ethical practice. Leading to enhance your brand credibility.
- Semantic HTML helps improve your site’s SEO ranking and raise its visibility.
- Reach a broader audience as your website is more usable to all groups regardless of their device or connection quality.
- Increase your brand awareness by promoting your human values in your work.
Typography and Readability
Typography
Choosing the perfect typography for your website is no easy task, it is one of the biggest challenges for designers. The wrong choice of typeface can ruin the entire team effort, as it will leave a negative impression on your potential customers when they visit the website.
Learn more about how to choose the best fonts for your brand here:
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t choose the suitable typeface the first time and improve it later. That is why listening to your audience is essential, as their feedback is the key to your success. Think about what they expect from you as a company and act accordingly.
All fonts have pros and cons, as long as you know how to use them properly. A combination of various fonts is a great choice to make your website stand out but overuse it can lead to very negative effects on the site.
Readability
However, readability is also important among the website design principles. You will not be able to pick the appropriate fonts without considering readability. What good is a pretty font if people can not read it?
Readability is what keeps your audience interested and interactive with your website. These are some tips to help you increase your readability when making your website:
Text Density
Density refers to the word count given to particular portions of the website. High density can overcrowd the information, reducing readability by decreasing the space between words and sentences. Therefore, it is vital to check the quantity of text written in each segment.
White Space
Spacing plays a big part in content-heavy layouts. White space balances the excessive amount of text and helps the viewer with the content flow. Separations from white space improve the readability, so keep the layout neat and avoid overcrowding the page.
Element Priority
Not all elements are equally important, you need to know what is more vital to your website and what is not. When a viewer visits your website, what they see first matters as it would be the first impression of you. Hence, try emphasizing the elements that speak “you” such as a bolded light highlighting the core values of your brand.
Scannable
Remember that not everyone has the time and energy to go through everything on your website. Therefore, making your content scannable is quite useful. Scannable text and readable text go hand in hand.
With scannable content, viewers will process the information faster, making it easier to impress them.
Color Scheme
Color Symbolism refers to the conscious or subconscious connections we have with colors as a result of our culture, religion, and life events. Each color has its meaning and vibe. And it is the designer’s job to know what color they should use to represent the brand’s personality.
Color Psychology is how viewers subconsciously feel when looking at it. For example, according to research red is the color that invokes rage, and heat. On the other hand, green gives you a more chilled, relaxing feeling.
Loading Speed and Performance
There is nothing more frustrating than a painfully slow website and it is a turn-off for most people. By reducing the site loading time, you positively increase traffic, attract more leads, and improve sales processes.
Seasonal designers know how to optimize the site to make it as fast as it can be by following these key metrics:
- First, contentful paint (FCP) is the time it takes for the site to receive the first byte from the server.
- Time to first byte (TTFB) is the time it takes to load the first image or text.
- Largest content paint (LCP) is the time it takes to load the largest element of the website, it can be text or visual.
- Page load time is the time it takes to display the entire site on the screen.
Website Design Principles Need Consistency and Branding
Consistency is a vital website design principle of making brand personality. A brand identity is how the brand presents themselves to the public. It shows off their values, personality, and missions. A consistent design helps solidify your image and make it more recognizable among the audience.
Tips to keep it consistent
- Use templates: Templates offer a structure for uniform design. Businesses can guarantee that the design aspects of their website are consistent by implementing templates for sites like the homepage, product pages, and contact pages.
- Create a style guide: A style guide is a document that specifies which design components should be utilized consistently across the website. It comprises color schemes, typography, artwork, and other visual aspects. This document is shared with designers and developers to guarantee uniformity across the site.
- Stick to one font: using multiple fonts on different pages can ruin the readability, aesthetics, and professionalism of your brand.
Mobile Friendly
With the rising popularity of mobile devices, it is only logical to make your website accessible to those devices. With a solid mobile-friendly design, you will likely reach a wider target audience. According to research, about 59% of people use mobile devices to access the internet.
To make a mobile-friendly site you need to:
Avoid large blocks of text
Huge chunks of text can be a hassle to read on a small mobile screen. Lots of text can make the website feel cluttered. Mobile users prefer easy-to-process information to long chunks of text. Instead, try making concise, straight-to-the-point elements for the mobile user to scan and digest.
Resize the element to fit the mobile screen
Buttons are vital website design features, especially when providing a call to action (CTA). They let users do actions on a web page, such as clicking to learn more about a product, adding goods to their carts, or making purchases.
These buttons must be easy to discover, appealing enough to pique the visitor’s interest, and clickable for mobile and desktop visitors.
Scale the images
Even though images, infographics, and animations on your site can be great for gaining engagement, it is crucial to optimize the size for them to fit into the mobile version.
Include a search bar
Mobile screens are smaller than desktops, so it can be hard to navigate around the website. Including a search option on your website can help consumers quickly and easily discover the information they need and enhance the general usability of your site.
In Conclusion
Effective design is the art of balancing both visual creativity and functional practices while applying the core website design principles. From visual hierarchy, and layout to user experience and mobile friendliness, you should consider all these factors to improve your website. In addition, they also help build your brand awareness while fostering trust between you and your audience.
We here at MindSparkz strives to become the best at what we do. We provide innovative ideas, up-to-the-minute concepts to slick up your brand personality.
Our mission is to help you establish your brand on the market and stand out from the rest with a WOW factor. Our custom product packaging design specialists will provide you with everything you need to elevate your brand identity.
We are more than just a creative product packaging design agency, we are your business partner. Get in touch with us TODAY.
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