The mysterious recipe for successful website design
The design of your website is much like the mysterious recipe for a delicious dish, it's a complicated, challenging and sometimes tiresome process but at the same time is worth getting exactly right.
The modern website design is more than just visual elements and aesthetics; it also affects your search rankings, your audience’s perceptions of your brand and it also influences their behaviors.
“Your website design and layout affect your entire web presence.”
Whether you’re starting from scratch or revamping your existing website, there are a few key ingredients to use to help you turn your online business and website design into a successful exercise.
Here are a few basic elements that are important to follow in your website design process:
Visual Layout is the Base
“Users take only 50 milliseconds to form an opinion of your website! ”
Visual layout and hierarchy is the base ingredient to good website design. You need to really “wow” your target audience as soon as the web page loads!
Your design should align with a handful of ingredients that give it the right balance of look and feel.
It should be simple, user-friendly, intuitive, clean, consistent and accessible.
White space gives the elements of your site room to breathe; it’s the key to establishing an effective visual hierarchy.
Grid-based designs help to organize design items and keep them in order.
Strong photography, icons, or graphics provide relevance to your text and visual appeal.
Images and visual elements need to complement each other and follow your brand guidelines.
Design landing pages with an intentional flow, that leads your viewers to your main call-to-action and makes them more likely to act.
There are patterns people’s eyes will follow which is extremely useful knowledge to have when putting together a page layout. The F-Pattern is suited for text heavy pages, so place your value proposition towards the top left to get attention. The Z-Pattern is suited to landing page design, so place your call to action along the Z path.
This will help get more conversions which is the ultimate goal for your website.
In addition to that, adopting a mobile-first approach to website design isn’t a nice, hip feature anymore — it’s a necessity. Even if you use ready made templates by well-known website builders, it all comes down to how you customize these templates. Moreover, the way you place your content and images can result with pages that are not mobile friendly. Ensuring to adopt a mobile-first approach to website design is key.
“The amount of mobile web traffic overtook desktop traffic five years ago and shows no signs of slowing down.”
Color is the Spice
Your color palette is very important in creating visual appeal and balance, similar to adding the right amount of spices to your dish. It will directly affect your visitors’ opinions of your site and needs to be selected carefully.
You need to pay attention to your brand, industry and your target audience demographics. As an example, professional businesses would go with deep blue or green to show professionalism. On the other hand, a photographer may want to rely on black and white to truly showcase the vibrancy of images. Choose your dominant color considering also your readers’ expectations, then focus on what type of color palette you want. For a visually-pleasing and effective color scheme, keep it simple and stick to colors that complement each other well.
One effective way to choose your colors, is to pick an image that inspires you and represents your business and select your color palette based on that image. It’s an easy and fun way to bring your website vision and purpose to life.
“Recent research indicates that up to 90% of today’s consumers purchase products based on color; 42% percent of online shoppers base their opinion of a website on design alone. ”
Typography is the Taste
The choice of font determines your style and taste of your brand. Industry and demographics principles need to be applied for typography (or fonts) as well. More formal brands will likely want to stick with distinguished serif fonts, while a creative photographer would use a very light and airy sans serif typeface.
As with the site’s overall design and layout, the key is to balance standard items with freshness. Your text should be easily readable (body copy should be at least 16 pixels). Using a complementary font for headings or accents gives your website it’s distinctive character. It is advisable not to go beyond three typefaces or uncommon sizing adjustments. There needs to be plenty of contrast between your text and the site’s background colors, inuring a light color is always paired with a dark tone.
Typography is a science and art in itself, with fonts having specific meanings that portray various industries and demographics. For example, there are fonts that are specific to wellness brands which convey different meanings. Optima is modern, urban, sophisticated and cosmopolitan while Josefin Sans is soft, inviting, airy, youthful and comforting. (6)
Pick wisely what you want your website to be like. It all depends on your taste.
Navigation is the Instructions
Navigational elements are like the instructions to the recipe. They tell you what to do and where to go. On your website, their purpose is to direct your visitors to the information they desire as quickly as possible. They can exist in a site’s header, body, and footer. Your site’s navigation needs to be clear and simple avoiding overly animated hover effects, complex, multi-tiered subnavs and too many call to actions that distract the visitor from the main purpose of the website.
Finally, don’t ignore the footer navigation menu. Users tend to scroll farther than you might expect. You can add a newsletter subscription, footer menu and links to your social media channels for visitors to stay connected.
“Some brands even witnessed up to 50% more conversions with an optimized footer”
Content is the Filling
Now we come to the juicy part which is the filling! Given people’s short attention spans and quick first impressions, communicating clearly is critical.
Information should be easy to read and digest at the same time interesting and useful. Efficiency is key, noting that using extra words and repeating phrases, can affect your primary message. Use headings and sub-headings to organize content sections and let your audience know what information you are providing with clear, visible call to action. Break up long lists into ordered or unordered lists instead of using long paragraphs. Just think short and sweet!
As for your a content marketing, you need to create content which provides real value to your audience as an effective way to market your business. The key is authentic content that is original and fresh which will help your SEO and website rankings on search engines.
Creating a content marketing strategy is a whole new ball game which we will talk about in another blog post.
We hope when you apply this mysterious recipe for your website design, it will turn out exceptional!
Sources
https://99designs.com/blog/tips/visual-hierarchy-landing-page-designs/
https://cxl.com/blog/first-impressions-matter-the-importance-of-great-visual-design/
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/00251740610673332/full/html
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/2016
https://www.thedenizenco.com/journal/8-free-fonts-for-the-wellness-brand
