Critical Elements of a Website Design
Last updated on November 11th, 2024 at 06:54 am
The Covid 19 pandemic has brought the world back home. People are now spending time online more than ever. They are shopping, reading transacting, and even getting entertained online these days. Thus it has become more competitive to grab the attention of the users online.
When you are a business owner, your website is the tool that helps you stay fresh in the minds of your people. It is what works relentlessly to give you better customers and generate revenue for your business.
If you want to get the patronage of your customers, you have to provide them with an excellent online experience when they visit your website.
A great website design is what is primary for providing a satisfactory user experience. Unless it functions perfectly and looks good, you cannot impress users.
This article guides you through the key elements that are useful for creating a great website design.
1. A Mobile Responsive Website Theme
Are you aware that 51.53% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices?
It is a trend that is here to stay as more people choose to access online from their mobile phones. Consequently, focusing on a mobile-friendly website can be a game-changer for your business.
A mobile responsive website layout means a design that is adaptable to different screen sizes. That too, without compromising on the quality of the website or the user experience. If your website doesn’t have a mobile-friendly interface, it can lead to loss of traffic and impact your website’s credibility.
2. User-friendly Navigation
The website layout should be designed such that it is simple and attractive at the same time. The website layout will give your visitors a quick impression of your business. However, this immediate impression can become a lasting one if you have an eye-catching design with smooth navigation.
Visitors to your website should be able to find what they are looking for easily. Having a good sitemap for your website is a wise idea and will be rather useful for your target visitors. Having an interactive menu can do the trick for your website.
3. Add a Visual Appeal
People are impressed with excellent visualization. Keeping this factor in mind, if you can make use of great infographics within your website content, it can add a layer of appeal for your visitors. You have hardly three seconds to impress your visitors. But while adding visually appealing elements, do not add a lot of animations and flash intros. Those can hide the primary purpose of the website for the visitors.
4. Keep a Minimalist Design
Focus on the content of the website. Keep the design to the minimal with clean and bold typography. Use text within the content that has a font of 16px or more. Use eye-soothing background colors that align with your brand colors.
Add typography that coordinates with the background and the brand colors within the website. It will add to the overall appeal of your website designs. Keep adequate space between the lines of content so that it enhances readability.
You can use a specific font type as a part of your brand identity. Keep this font consistent for all your website content across all the pages and even other resources where you share your content.
5. Create and Use a Hamburger Menu
If you have several categories of items to display, you can use hamburger menus to feature them on your website. Since straight menus take up a lot of space, adding a hamburger menu can open up the navigation drawer.
It is a space-saving idea and also keeps the user interface clean. It is also great for a smooth user experience.
6. Speed of Website
Yet another critical element for a good website design is to maintain a great website speed. Your website should load within 5 seconds. People do not like to wait for a website to load. They would rather move on to some other website to search for what they were initially looking for.
Building a website with lightning speed is not an impossible task. All you need is careful planning and some optimization. For instance, regardless of the size of the images within the website, optimize them all. Choose a good hosting environment. You can choose from a shared hosting domain or VPS hosting. You can also opt for a dedicated server for your website hosting. It will optimize the site speed and enhance the user experience for your visitors.
7. Use Interactive Designs on the Website
If your website is designed with an interactive theme, it will immediately engage your visitors. An interactive website design is better in handling the attention of the visitors. It also influences them significantly to follow the call to action (CTA).
In other words, an engaging website can lead to a better conversion rate. Having a greater conversion rate is one of the main objectives of any online business website.
8. Focus on the Branding of the Website
Build your brand presence online. There are different ways to create and enhance your brand presence. Make sure it is portrayed on your website too. Branding of the website is of utmost importance for any business. Proper branding of the website adds to the credibility of your business and boosts the reputation significantly.
When the visitors are impressed with the branding of your website, you also have to keep in mind certain things. Like, arrange different website elements within the page in such a manner so that they make sense to your visitors.
9. Use Limited Colors of Significance on Your Website
Color schemes are very crucial for designing a good website. Use a strong color palette that can create cohesiveness in what you put forward to your customers. You must have a strong sense of balance when using colors on your website.
For eg. Take a look at the Colour used by Pepsi on their website
Alignment and contrast of the color are equally necessary factors. Too many colors on a webpage might make it look disturbing, and too few colors might make the website look bland.
Choose an intense background color and use a couple of accent colors that align with your brand colors to find the right balance. If you think some colors look repetitive on your website, you can play with the hues and the tints of those colors too. Add a variety of hues on different web pages to create distinguishable variations.
10. Make Use of Ample White Space
White space looks attractive on the website if you know how to place it. White space is the space within the website that doesn’t necessarily need to be white. It acts as a buffer for all the design elements on your website and gives it a space to breathe. If you crowd your website with many designs and content, your visitor might feel cluttered and lost amidst the jungle of information.
Use white space aesthetically and in an organized manner. It will change the way your website looks and will make it soothing to the eyes.
11. Place Your CTA Button at an Interesting Place
Converting your visitors to leads is your ultimate objective. To fulfill that objective, you must have a definite call to action that influences your visitors to buy from you.
Add a call to action button on your website strategically with enticing website content and promotional offers. You can include the CTA buttons at optimal places within your website.
Here is an example of the best usage of CTA buttons from Spotify’s website.
There can be multiple places to add these buttons, like on the sidebars or resource pages. You can also add a call to action on the homepage to grab the attention of unassuming visitors.
12. Use High-quality Graphic and Video Content
Videos impress people more easily and more quickly than standard text content. Thus, good quality engaging videos can significantly impact the decision-making process for your visitors.
Add product videos and business feature videos on your website to hold on to the attention of your visitors. But make sure to add high-quality videos and that too sparingly.
Too many videos can again clutter your website and make it look trashy.
Adding business features and product videos is a great way to highlight your business. They allow your visitors to understand the value of your products without investing a lot of their valuable time. Place these videos strategically. You can place one video on the products page to demonstrate your products and another one on the home page to introduce your background team.
13. Use High-quality Compelling Content Within Your Website
Encourage your visitors to engage on your website. And you can only do that when you have something exciting and valuable to share with your visitors.
Craft compelling content and place it aesthetically within your website. Use content that will add value to your website engage your visitors and help them build trust in your business. Content should have easy readability too, and only then will it contribute to the overall success of your website design.
14. Implement SEO Strategies in Website Design
User experience is the priority when it comes to website design. But you can also incorporate SEO strategies in the website design to enhance the website’s rankings on the search engine pages. Most of these SEO strategies are invisible to the naked eye but can boost the rankings of your website considerably.
Certain design tricks take care of the SEO for your website. Add relevant title tags and meta tags, headings, and other HTML coding to your website to make a lasting impression on the search engine ranking.
15. Don’t Forget to Add the Social Media Icons
Your website will cease to grow unless you take the help of social media platforms. You just cannot do without them. So make sure to add the various social media buttons and icons at the right places within your website. Add them at the header or the footer; just don’t miss out on placing them.
When you have the social media buttons visible on your website, it influences your visitors to share your content that they find relevant. It gives you publicity at no extra cost. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of it?
Besides, you too can share your content on various social media platforms and ask your readers to share them. Extra publicity, greater reach without much effort- for you.
16. Easy Check-Out Process
When the end objective for your website is to sell products to your customers, you have to ensure that the checking-out process is a smooth one. If there are lots of formalities at the checking out process, you will find most of your customers abandoning their cart with annoyance. Do not let that happen simply by ensuring that the checking-out process is buttery smooth.
It is wise to use an SSL certification to get hold of a security certificate. It will make your website secure and add more credibility and reliability to your website. Your customers will trust you better and make purchases with ease.
To sum it all up
Every website is constantly competing against millions of other similar websites. Make yours stand out with an appealing and better design that is also highly functional. When the competition is so fierce, you should only focus on designs that are aesthetically pleasing and effective at the same time.
Use the above-mentioned guidelines as best practices when designing your website. Your business will grow bigger and better online in no time at all.
Author’s bio:
Joseph Schneider is the Director at Haitna, an SEO-firm based in Fort Worth. He has an overall experience of more than two decades in the internet marketing industry. My expertise includes a wide array of capabilities like reputation management, PPC, and marketing automation.
