In the process of designing a website?
Well, you’re not the only one.
As of right now, there are well over 1.7 billion websites on the internet. And the number’s getting larger every single second. Sure, not all of those sites are active, but it just goes to show how saturated the online world is becoming.
If you want your new website to stand out, then it needs to be of the highest quality possible!
Thankfully, it doesn’t always take much to create a quality site. Stick to the basic web design principles we’re to talk about in this post, and you’ll be well on your way to a winner. Sound good?
Read on to discover seven essential design principles to incorporate into your websites.
1. Intuitive In Nature
There’s nothing worse than spending time on a clunky, complex website.
You know the ones.
The navigation makes no sense and you have no idea how to get where you want to go. The site architecture is all off, creating a confusing and maze-like onsite experience. Not finding what you need, you almost certainly click off and look elsewhere.
That, of course, is the opposite of what you want to do on your new website.
The key is to make it as intuitive to use as possible. Users shouldn’t have to think about anything. They should know, as if by magic (when really it’s all to do with your amazing design-work) how to navigate the site and get the information they need.
Leave no room for uncertainty in the mind of a user. Make sure everything from the copy to the link structure is logical and easy to understand.
2. Less Is More
Remember, your website should be as intuitive as possible in order to enhance the user experience.
Succeed in that endeavor by leaving out anything that’s unnecessary.
Sign up forms provide a perfect example.
It’s your job to make it as easy for someone to provide their contact details as possible. The more boxes on that form that you have, the more barriers you effectively put up.
Keep in mind the fact that humans are naturally lazy.
It’s built into our systems. Furthermore, our attention spans are shorter than ever before. We want the path of least resistance; a route that gets us to our destination with minimal effort.
Take the less is more approach. Ask yourself ‘why?’ three times before including something.
3. KISS!
Or, “keep it simple, stupid!”
That handy acronym builds upon our previous point. Removing unnecessary barriers is one way of cultivating simplicity.
But you shouldn’t stop there.
Think about the visual side of your design work. Forget about using tons of features, fonts, colors, pop-ups, and images. The end result will be a higgledy-piggledy mishmash of distractions.
Users won’t know where to look or what to do. There are only so many visual stimuli someone can handle. The main points get lost when there’s too much to look at.
Everything should be as simple as possible.
Unsure how to do it? This web development company can help.
4. Include Space
One component of keeping things simple is to incorporate white space into your site.
By ‘white space’ we just mean ‘space’!
We don’t really mean ‘white’ as much as we do ‘blank’. It can be any color you want, as long as there’s nothing actually in it.
Think about your work desk.
How do you feel when it’s packed full of mess, old paper, random items, dirty dishes, and so on? There’s a good chance you feel stressed out and unable to focus. Clean it all up to create a mess-free workspace and you feel calmer and more able to concentrate.
A similar thing happens on busy websites. Insufficient space makes everything harder; readability goes down and cognitive load goes up.
Be sure to include enough space around your copy, images, and features.
5. Grab Attention
You don’t have long to grab a user’s attention.
As we said before, our attention spans are notoriously short these days.
For your website to succeed, it must manage to grab somebody within a few short seconds. If somebody’s landed on your website, then you owe it to yourself to keep ‘em there.
Big headlines, attractive images, pictures of peoples’ faces, pop-ups, big buttons, and emotive ‘power-words’ can all help you do it.
Incorporate these kinds of elements and people are more likely to stick around.
Of course, that’s of utmost importance if you’re trying to attract leads and drive conversions.
6. Use Quality Images
A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?
People are visual by nature. Our brains have developed to consume images with far greater ease than the written word. After all, writing is only a relatively recent development in evolutionary terms.
We were processing images far before writing.
The result? Our attention is naturally drawn to images. Be sure to include lots of high-quality photos on your website. That word, ‘high-quality’, is key though.
Poor quality pictures can do more damage than good; stock photos are too generic and overused. Try to get original, high-quality photography for your site wherever possible.
7. Test at Every Opportunity
Our final tip is to test your website out at every opportunity.
Just because you follow all of these tips doesn’t mean your design’s necessarily going to be a success! It should- but there’s never any guarantee!
Without testing, you’ll never know for sure that the choices you make are beneficial or not. Treat the design process as a series of iterations. Get a rough beta-model of the site together and unleash it on a sample group of people.
Get their feedback, complete with criticisms. From there, set about righting the wrongs and bettering the site. Do that enough times and you can ensure the site you come to publish will succeed at scale.
Incorporate These Basic Web Design Principles
You can’t throw an old website together and expect it to stand out amongst the millions already out there.
Incorporate these basic web design principles, though, and you stand a far better shot. We hope they help.
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