Web designing is a complicated job that requires expertise in many fields and productive marketing strategies. Understanding all the ins and outs of designing a functional business website may take months. To give you a jumping-off point, below, we have given 11 website design principles and best practices you need to follow.
Everyone running a business can easily establish a website in the digital business market. But the real challenge is using creative and user-friendly ideas to stay in the race among the rivals. Your business website will become a breeze with an attractive design and user-friendly features.
In the competitive world where we have more than 1.8 million websites, you must focus on designing functional and attractive websites to stand out from the crowd. A business website acts as your 24/7 storefront and enables customers to determine your credibility and authenticity. If you provide your customers with an appealing, customer-friendly, and intuitive website design, they are likelier to stick with your brand.
Importance of Adopting Website Design Best Practices
A business website helps your audience check the authenticity of your business. The website design can drastically affect your conversion rates and lead generation. A web design survey reveals that about 38.5% of visitors leave a website because of its outdated design and poor content structure.
A thorough understanding of web design best practices is essential to prepare your business for success in all areas. 75% of online retailers believe that a brand’s/business’ reliability depends on its visual representation.
Web design best practices can give you all the perks needed to get tailored results from your business website.
Better Growth
An attractive and functional website design helps you engage visitors and generate higher leads.
Boost Conversions
A well-designed business website is essential to boost your sales and conversions from your online visitors.
Improve Search Rankings
A professional website design helps you improve your search rankings in different search engines like Google.
Build a Consistent Brand Identity
You can communicate your brand’s story more effectively with a well-structured website design. It helps establish a consistent brand identity and improves your business’s trustworthiness and credibility.
11 Website Design Principles
- Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is a proven website design principle that helps you highlight certain parts of your website. It establishes a focal point for your visitors to see the essential information at a glance. Visual hierarchy lets your readers quickly scan your web pages and get the right information.
- Accessibility
Website accessibility is a fundamental web design principle that must not be overlooked. A recent web design survey highlights that 61.5% of visitors leave a website because of its poor navigation and accessibility.
To increase the accessibility of your website, you must ensure that background does not overpower the content, and text should be eligible.
- White Space
A website with white spaces draws the visitors’ attention to certain website elements like CTAs (call-to-action) and enables them to digest your content. More than 14% of visitors notice the whitespace on your website.
- Simplicity
A complicated website design overwhelms your visitors and makes it difficult for them to take certain actions. More than 84.6% of web designers say that a cluttered and crowded website is the most common mistake made by small businesses. Simplicity can be your best friend in improving your website usability and UX perspective. Putting too many elements on your website does not allow visitors to accomplish the necessary steps. A simple website design not only appeals to visitors but enables them to navigate from one page to another effortlessly.
- Consistency
It has essential to have consistency in your website design. The font size, button style, heading, subheadings, and CTAs must be the same throughout the site. Plan everything before developing a website to balance the right font size and color combination.
- Mobile Compatibility
According to a recent report by Statista, 54.8% of global website traffic is generated through mobile devices. With the ever-growing use of smartphones and tablets, the device compatibility of your website must be improved. If your website design does not fit well with different screen sizes, you’re more likely to lose the battle.
- Easy Loading
A web design survey shows that over 88.5% of visitors do not stay on websites with slow loading. You can increase the load time of your website by optimizing image size and combining code into a central CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
- Color Combination
39% of visitors appreciate attractive color combinations more than any other website feature. An attractive color palette for your website is vital to creating an appealing atmosphere. A complementary color combination can give your visitors a more balanced and optimized look.
- Responsive Design
73.1% of visitors believe that a non-responsive website design leads them to leave a website. Moreover, 48% of the global web traffic generates from mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Your website must have compatibility with the responsive web design to provide an excellent user experience.
A responsive web design enables you automatically reshuffle and resize the content to fit every screen size. It gives a highly flexible website structure, providing a seamless user experience on different devices.
- Communication
The ultimate purpose of a website is to provide information about your brand or services. If you offer excellent communication channels on your website, the visitors will spend more time on it.
You can establish effortless communication with your visitors by cutting the waffle and organizing the information into headings and subheadings.
- Fitts’ Law (Keep the Actionable Targets Easy to Reach)
Fitts’ law says that the size and distance of the actionable target significantly impact the time users take action. It means you must keep the main actionable targets simple and easy to reach. You can add extra spacing if your website has multiple actionable targets. It will help users to click on the right icon and take immediate action.
11 Website Design Best Practices You Need to Know
Designing a great website entails thoughtful steps such as content creation, layout, and conceptualization. You can follow our 11 website design best practices to ensure your website’s success.
- Prioritize Search Engine Optimization
You can have a higher ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) by implementing the best SEO practices on your website. Statistics highlight that nearly 53% of trackable website traffic generates from organic search.
You must include top-ranking keywords throughout the website to get tailored results. Search engines like Google track a website based on the keywords used by the customers/users. The more effectively you provide customer-oriented content, the more organic traffic you will generate on your website.
You can optimize your website for different search engines by using short and descriptive URLs, meta descriptions, proper page titles, relevant header tags, and a responsive web design.
- Keep the Design Simple and Clean
You must ensure that your website design is not cluttered and complicated. A cluttered website design can distract your visitors and give them a flashy view. You can keep the design simple and clean using proper negative space and establishing a virtual hierarchy.
Whitespace can give an aesthetic appearance to your website while ensuring a seamless user experience. It enables users to concentrate on essential information and digest informative content.
A simple and clean website design prevents analysis paralysis and aids users’ ability to concentrate on critical items. It can encourage your visitors to leave comments on your blog posts, subscribe to a newsletter, shares your content with others, and check out your current collection.
- Consistent Branding
A strong brand identity goes beyond aesthetics and represents your business as a whole. It crystallizes your different brand assets, such as color palette, logo, and typography.
Maintaining consistent branding throughout the website is vital as it highlights your business’ credibility and memorability. Your brand’s logo, website iconography, key messaging, and brand voice should remain consistent.
The main objective of your website should be to strengthen your brand quality and users’ perception of your brand/services. Consistent branding assists you in establishing an aesthetic tone on your website and building brand quality.
- Consistent Color Scheme
More than 39% of visitors believe that the website’s color scheme matters more than any other visual element. A consistent color scheme of your website can enhance the visual identity of your brand/service. When selecting the color scheme for your website, you must consider the intended functions and target audience.
- Clear CTAs (Call-to-Actions)
A clear CTA on your website encourages your visitors to take prompt actions, such as subscribing to your content, booking an appointment, or purchasing a product at any point. If you don’t include engaging CTAs on your website, the visitors will likely leave after a short period.
You can get better results by adding straightforward, clear, and easy-to-understand CTAs. Adding CTAs to each web page would be great for tracking conversions easily.
- Easy Navigation
Your website must feature easy navigation to enable visitors to easily access the relevant pages, navigate quickly, and check your current collection. Easy navigation is the most critical aspect of designing a unique website.
As a rule of thumb, your website should use a shallow navigation approach to enable visitors to access each page in three or fewer clicks. Keep the navigation bar cleared and uncluttered to give a smooth user experience.
- Use Storytelling Approach
How you deliver content significantly impacts the number of visitors and the time spent on your website. Storytelling is a traditional approach to conveying key messages more effectively and interestingly. This approach delivers an emotional impact and breaks down the barriers to understanding and engagement. You can grab visitors’ attention by implementing a storytelling approach instead of facts.
The ultimate objective of your website design is to encourage visitors to take certain actions via CTAs. The storytelling approach motivates visitors to spend more time on your website and actively purchase a product or service.
- Use Heatmaps
Heatmaps give a productive way to track areas where users spend more time on your website. They track the movement of your users to help you identify which areas of your website need modifications.
The information you get from heatmaps assists you in various directions, such as;
- It enables you to test real data against hypotheses to ensure you implement the right website design choices.
- It allows you to optimize CTA placement to increase the conversion rate.
- It can assist you in monitoring and refining your navigation buttons.
- In short, heatmaps are an effective way to make data-driven improvements in your website design.
- Monitor the Speed of your Website
The speed of your website decides how much time visitors will spend on your site. A slow-loading website does not only frustrate your visitors but also affects your business’s credibility. It is compulsory to ensure that your website has a fast loading speed. Otherwise, it will not rank higher on search engine result pages.
- Content Optimization
Content optimization is crucial to make your website search engine friendly. You can implement basic SEO strategies in image captions, headings, subheadings, and URLs to optimize your content and tailor it to the users’ searches.
- Use High-Quality Images
Nearly 40% of users believe that high-quality images grab their attention more than any other visual element. Superb-quality images are essential to designing an attractive website as they give users a visual break from the content.
Good use of quality images can bring more colors and life to your website design. Websites with clear pictures are easy to navigate and offer a seamless user experience. You can also make any image movable on your website by implementing a piece of code into your HTML.
Bottom Line
A website design reflects your brand’s/business’ identity. You should implement well-established and proven UX tactics to design a unique website. An impressive website design gives you a successful online presence and grabs users’ attention at a glance.