An appealing website must be in accordance with the users’ expectations or could even exceed expectations.
The design must be perfectly arranged and aligned, besides using accurate colours, fonts, and other graphic design elements so that it shows what the user wants to see and can be found easily—no juggling or taking time where the button is for visitors.
Regarding ease of use, experts have identified certain principles of website design that, by following, can lead to a user-friendly website.
You can build trust with the viewers and convince them to perform CTA when considering such website designs.
So, let’s see what principles can be guidelines but not strict rules for coming up with an interactive website design.
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Principles of a Decent Website Design
Website Purpose
When users view your website, they expect you to design it according to their needs and preferences. This implies that the website must acclimate to the user’s demands.
First, you can determine the motive behind your website design. Your website gives the audience information regarding your product or services and portrays your brand storytelling —history, values, goals, mission, and vision. What niches does your brand belong to? Is your brand about entertainment, financial dealing, or real estate? What are your aim audience’s likes/dislikes? Are you aiming at adults, children, or teenagers? Are you a B2B or B2C seller? These things help you select fonts, colours, layouts, and structures that align with your preferences and needs.
Simplicity
When you design a website, you should be aware that your target audience will grasp everything you offer the moment they click on it. This means that your website must be simple enough to provide the best UX and UI.
Now, simplicity doesn’t mean building a plain website with few options. Here, simplicity means the website must be designed to show the ideal colours, and the typography and graphical images must match the target audience’s preferences and your brand character.
1. Colour: Colour has the strength to evoke a feeling that matches your brand personality. Colours can convey the right message of your brand. Know what colours you can use to relate your brand message; learning colour psychology is mandatory, or take the expertise of talented graphic designers like Logo Design companies. As for simplicity in website design, always use not more than five colours and try to go for complementary, which works well. When you use pleasing colours, you can get client engagement faster.
2. Typography: Text styling in website design is another major aspect to consider. It shows you the brand’s voice and tone. It’s not just about how the words look but also how they make people feel. Different fonts can grab an individual’s attention and show what your brand is about. So, for simplicity, try to use legible fonts, or if you are making your own fonts, try not to style them in a way that appears confusing or fails to convert what you want to convey to appeal to the audience. There are many options for font selection; you can pick the easiest one from those.
3. Imagery: Imagery is the symbolism or figurative language that represents a brand, like logos, colours, fonts, photography, illustration, video, and any other graphical elements. These visuals are carefully chosen and designed to convey the brand’s identity, values, and message to its audience. The website design is all about imagery. After all, your website is full of images, colours, fonts, and animations. So, all the images must be expressive, which means they express brand values, offerings, and vision. For instance, if you are a law organisation, the colours, fonts, and graphic images you use show trustworthiness and professionalism to the visitors.
Not only this, but all elements’ structure and alignment, such as layout, negative and white spaces, and navigations in a website, must be in a straight line or properly positioned.
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Navigation
It is a gate users use to enter from the main page to another or interact with what they are searching for.
There are lots of navigational options, like the top navigation, which contains the website’s subpage link and always exists on top of the website; footer navigation, which contains the less important links (terms of service, privacy policy, or about us) and always exists on the web page’s bottom.
Next comes the sidebar navigation, which most of the time exists on the left side of the website and is vertical in style. It shows the product or service categories.
Another one is the hamburger menu, a compact menu icon with three horizontal lines that can be enlarged when clicked. Another one is the breadcrumb navigation, which shows the user’s exact location; dropdown menus show the subpage of the webpage; and tabbed navigation, which organises multiple sections or categories of content using tabs.
Another is the search bar, which allows visitors to search and relate to the product or service using a keyword; fixed or sticky navigation that is visible on top of the page. Even when the user scrolls down the page, they are still visible.
From all these navigation options, you need to pick those that help users easily search for what they are looking for. Always use simple and intuitive navigation on all pages.
F-Shaped Pattern Reading
The most standard method that allows visitors to scan the text on-site is with an F-based pattern. As per the eye-racking research, it gets it that the first thing when people visit a website is the top part and left area of the screen. This happens because we read from left to right and top to bottom, so our eyes naturally follow this path when looking at web pages. A well-designed website will perform with the reader’s natural ability to view first on top and left while scanning the page.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the arrangement of website elements in order of importance. This covers everything in imagery, including elements alignment, texture, negative spaces, colours and contrast, white space reading pattern, and proximity. When you put perfectionism into all these elements, it guides the user’s eyes through the content in a hierarchy of values. Visual hierarchy is all about how you give alignment, arrangement, and structure to your website in a logical manner that assists users in navigating and learning about the information given conveniently. The most important part of the visual hierarchy is establishing focal points that show the views where the most vital information exists.
Content
Great content, either in written form or in graphical form, is a great way to enhance attraction on your website. When you in your content use compelling text in the form of a website using CTA, landing pages, storytelling on the about us page, and educate them via blogs and case studies, you are converting your visitors into actual customers and constantly updating them with new content talking about trends; you can retain them as well.
Grid Based Layout
When you use grid-based layouts in your website, they will give your page a perfect structure and keep your content well organised. With these layouts, you can arrange the content into a clean grid structure with sections and columns that are arranged in a line and are balanced. These visually appealing grids impose order on the chaos of design, resulting in a clean and aesthetically pleasing website or layout.
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Load Time
Always remember that you need to work on the technical part of the website to give a healthy UX. Here, the technical part means the load times. About more than half of website visitors presume that the website should load in less than 2 seconds, and if it takes more than 3 seconds, viewers feel disturbed and leave the site on the spot.
So, once you feel your website is burdened with a lot of heavy images, enable Browser Caching or Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, use Content Delivery Network (CDN), inline critical CSS, or use server-side rendering to speed up initial page load, Use CSS sprites for small images to reduce the number of image requests, enable Gzip Compression and even optimise fonts by using system fonts or subset custom fonts to include only necessary characters.
This way, you can reduce the image size to diminish the website load times.
Mobile Friendly
Today, mobile is everywhere. We hope you are viewing this blog on your smartphone. Clients won’t imagine exploring without mobile, either watching movies on Netflix, searching for products or services, or even spending their free time. When building a website, you have two options: build an app besides making a website or make a mobile-friendly website. So always consider all the layouts, alignments, fonts, and navigations in your brain and design them in a way that appears to be adjustable on multiple screens and won’t go stretched out or, swooshed or shrunken.
Conclusion
These are the principles you need to consider when designing a decent website. So, appreciate these and design a website that is simple, intuitive, and user-friendly on all platforms.
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