Finding that sweet spot between form and function is the key to designing a successful website. A well-designed website inspires confidence, directs users to take action, and provides a satisfying experience for them.
How, then, will each step of your website’s user journey consistently impress your target audience? Keep reading to learn web design principles, why they matter, and how to apply them to your website.
Useful Web Design Principles
Here are the main web design principles you should know.
1. Seamless navigation
Visitors may quickly discover the content they need thanks to the site’s intuitive navigation. Without it, visitors to your site may be confused about what they should do next. Your website’s structure should provide relevant information in a way that is easy to follow and intuitive for visitors. Structured menus, keyword searches, and internal links are just a few of the ways that many websites assist visitors to navigate.
Make it simple for users to find what they’re looking for on your site by using descriptive headings, logical groupings, and consistent placement of pieces. For a smooth navigating experience, it’s important to keep things basic.
2. Responsive design
This is one of the major web design principles. With responsive web design, your site will automatically modify itself based on the visitor’s screen size, resolution, and orientation. With responsive design, your site will look great and function as intended on any device.
A successful website is one that displays properly across all viewports, from mobile to desktop and everything in between, regardless of their size or aspect ratio. To do this, responsive design scales images and rearranges material to fit different screen sizes and browsers. A web design company can help you get a website that has a responsive design.
3. Across-the-board consistency
A website’s overall feeling of completion, as well as its usability and learnability, are enhanced by a design and set of features that are consistent throughout. Everything from the colors and fonts you choose to the strategic positioning of your site’s icons and buttons is part of the user experience. Your site visitors will have a more favorable and consistent experience if they are able to learn how to use one section of your site and then apply those skills to other sections.
To keep your website looking uniform, it’s a good idea to create a style guide or design system with reusable features and components.
4. Smooth performance
The design of a good website should allow for speedy loading times, smooth functionality, and clear error messages. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is only one of many accessible tools for gauging how quickly your site’s content loads.
Changing the sizes of images or any other code that runs in the background and slows down your site is one way to improve its performance. You may improve your site’s performance by making sure it displays correctly in different browsers and that all interactions work regardless of the user’s connection speed or browser.
The perceived performance of your site can be improved in the event of a delay in content loading by displaying a reassuring error notice, exhibiting a loading animation, or loading the most critical items first while other elements continue to load in the background.
Related Article: How to Improve Website Loading Speed?
5. Frictionless conversion
The procedure of registering, subscribing, or purchasing should be as simple as feasible for site users. Each website has a certain goal in mind for its visitors, and getting them to take that action is a major design consideration.
It’s already challenging enough to turn site visitors into buyers without adding unnecessary obstacles like distracting images, misleading labels, or excessive information requests. For this reason, conversion procedures should be easy to follow and not cause any unnecessary difficulties for the user. Some ways to accomplish this goal include doing away with extraneous procedures, collecting only the information that is truly important, and creating prominent calls to action.
6. Clear communication
There are a variety of ways in which websites interact with their audiences. The combination of text, images, and interactivity results in a unified message that is easy to understand and engage with. You want people to visit your website, see what you’re giving, and know exactly what to do next as quickly as possible. Visitors may become frustrated and quit your site if they are unable to understand your message.
The design process will go more smoothly if you have a firm grasp of the message you want to send from the get-go. You should also ensure that your message is readable and legible.
7. Effective visual language
Colors, icons, typography, images, and other visual elements all work together to provide a unified visual language in well-designed websites. A powerful user interface and visual language communicate clearly and stand out from the competition with a distinct and memorable aesthetic. Cohesive, memorable, and engaging experiences may be created across your site and beyond by combining good writing with effective visual language.
Read the article about 10 tips for getting started on a web design project to know more factors you should look for while designing a website.
8. Hierarchical content structure
The content on your site ought to be well-structured and simple to understand. You can create a meaningful and logical framework for the content by using visual hierarchy to give more prominence to the most significant details and less to the less crucial ones.
Visual strategies such as color, contrast, size, white space, alignment, and movement can all be used to establish a visual hierarchy. Visitors are more likely to retain and use the knowledge gained from a site with a well-organized, hierarchical structure that provides obvious pathways to the material they want.
9. Familiar web conventions
When we first discover a well-designed website, it typically has a familiar feel about it. In such instances, moving from one page to another is natural, content can be quickly located and comprehended, and all features operate as expected.
That’s because the greatest web designs adhere to established web conventions, which are basically guidelines for making websites user-friendly. Creating a user-friendly interface on the web requires adhering to established norms that users have internalized after encountering thousands of other sites. According to Jakob’s Law, most of a website’s visitors will go to other pages. This suggests that users have a strong preference for familiarity when exploring a new website.
Instead of forcing users to learn a new system every time they visit, you may make it easier for them to locate what they’re looking for by designing your site according to established web conventions, such as those pertaining to interface design, visual design, and information architecture. A common web convention is to place a navigation bar across the top of the page with buttons that link to other sections of the site. Although it may be novel to place the navigation bar at the page’s footer or to employ labels that some visitors may not recognize, doing so may lead to poor usability.
10. A reliable, transparent interface
Building credibility with site visitors is essential. The credibility of your online space depends on the clarity, consistency, and accuracy of the information you provide. It should be clear and concise, with no room for misunderstanding.
A trustworthy website will communicate with its visitors in an open and honest manner, providing them with clear information regarding fees and pricing, the purpose of collecting personal data, and genuine reviews and testimonials from existing customers. Together, these factors increase the likelihood that a visitor will have a favorable impression of your site and, by implication, of you or your business.