Today, users don’t spend their time on poor-quality websites. The reason is, people have so many options. If your website fails to provide a quality user experience, your visitors are just a few clicks away from your competitors’ websites.
To survive in this competitive market, having an appealing, easy-to-navigate website is a must. There’s so much that goes into web designing. It’s not just about making the website visually appealing, it’s also essential to ensure the website’s navigation and functionality.
Why is Web Design Important?
When it comes to building an online presence, your website creates a significant impact. Don’t build a website for the sake of. You need to make sure everything is perfect, starting from visuals to navigation.
A poorly designed website won’t just reduce the average time spent on the website, it will create a negative image in the minds of your visitors.
To provide a quality user experience and make visitors spend more time on your website, it’s imperative to keep users at the center and design the website accordingly.
Top 10 Web Design Principles and Elements
Let’s take a look at some crucial website design components:
Visual design
Visual design is one of the most important elements of a good website. It includes typography, images, color palette, and graphical elements you use in your website. Including beautiful visuals on the website can help you attract your visitors’ attention. This way, your visitors are going to spend more time on your website. With visual designs, you can communicate with your audience in a creative way.
Navigation
Navigation is another crucial element that affects user experience. To stand apart from others, don’t make it complex. Simple site navigation would make it easy for users to navigate and be accessible from any page. Apart from making it well-structured and user-friendly, having simple website navigation would also help with search engine optimization.
Content
Quality content won’t just make your website engaging, it will help with search engine ranking as well. When it comes to ranking, search engines always give high priority to websites with high-quality content. Your website goal could be to generate leads or sales. With content, you are encouraging visitors to take a particular action so that you can achieve your website goals.
CTA
CTA or call to action tells users what to do next. Your website might have appealing visuals and great-quality content, but without a call to action, visitors will have no idea what action they should take next. The purpose could be to make users purchase your product, provide contact information, or get information. The clear CTA button will tell what exactly you want them to do.
User-friendliness
When designing the website, it’s important to keep users at the center. In web design, visual isn’t everything. It’s just part of it. You need to focus on its usability as well. This includes navigation, content, etc. Bad usability can ruin the user experience and affect your brand negatively.
Mobile-friendly design
If the website is not responsive on mobile devices, users with mobile devices won’t be able to use it properly. You can reach a wider audience by making your website mobile-friendly. According to the latest report, mobile devices hold 59.02% market share. This data alone is enough to explain the importance of making websites mobile-friendly.
White space
To grab visitors’ attention, many web designers fill up their websites with so much content and visuals. Well, doing so can ruin the user experience. Spacing between elements or content will keep users engaged with your website.
Speed optimization
Speed optimization is another crucial factor web designers should be focusing on. No matter how appealing the website is and how engaging its content is, if it takes too long to load, visitors will bounce back. Page loading speed is the factor that affects user experience as well as the site’s search rankings. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to test your site's loading speed.
Color schemes
If you are after building a brand online, be conscious about the color palette you use when designing the website. Take into account your business industry, your brand theme, etc. factors when deciding color schemes.
Unique typography
Do you know typography and fonts have a great impact on readability? The use of the right typography, fonts, size, color, etc. also matters a lot in web designing. Wrong typography and fonts choice can make reading boring for your visitors.
Final Thoughts
Web design creates a significant impact on user experience. The proper implementation of all basic web design elements will improve your site’s usability, performance, and user experience.
Here, we have walked you through all the essential website design elements so that you can make your website appealing as well as user-friendly.