5 Principles of Good Website Design
Last updated: Nov 29, 2019
The success of a website depends on its design. A well-designed website can help make trust and convert visitors to the customers. But it is not all about visual appearance of your site. Good design makes use of a balanced combination of both usability and ecstatic. Here, we collected 5 most important principles of good website design.
1- Keep it Simple
Once Leonardo da Vinci said that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. This is especially true for web design. A professional Web Design means a simple and usable layout. Today website visitors behave like hunters. They want to pick information as quickly as possible. So, it is important communicate your message clearly and make your information easy to find and read.
This explains why a complex website full of eye-catching animations and images doesn’t work. Putting too many visual elements on your page will distract people from the purpose of your website. Besides, an over-designed website usually is a sluggish one which is considered as a piece of terrible news both for users and search engines.
No one likes websites that take a long time to load. Study shows that most people leave a website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load.
A clean and fresh design of your website not only enhances the user experience but is also important for search engine optimization. So, as a rule of thumb, eliminate fancy and unnecessary elements from your website and keep your layout as simple as possible.
2- Navigation and Visual Hierarchy for Web Design
Your visitors don’t like to make an effort to find the information they need. One effective tactic is using the visual hierarchy to arrange your page elements by importance. In this way, people are able to distinguish the more important information from the details. This leads to a positive end-user experience as well as a good-looking website.
You can create a visual hierarchy by either size, color, contrast, alignment or white space. The point is to try drive the users’ attention to the focal point of your site. Which method you use to bring visual hierarchy to your design is not as important as consistency across all pages. A consistent design is where a professional designer is differentiated from a novice one.
Easy navigation is the key to retaining website visitors. If your users cannot find what they are looking for within just three clicks, they will give up and leave your website. This is called the golden rule of three-clicks in website design. The key is developing navigation that is simple, intuitive and consistent on every page.
To help users reach your content more easily, you should give a link to the important topics not only in the Navigation menu but also in the different places such as testimonials on the homepage or call-to-action boxes.
3- Content and Readability
Effective web design involves both a great visual structure and useful content. People come to your website to find desired information. So,if you want to increase the traffic to your website and convert your visitors into customers, provide high quality and useful content.
The text on your website should be readable and styled clearly. Use fonts that readable and visually appealing.
A reasonable choice is using easier to read fonts such as Arial, Helvetia, etc. Adjust the font size of your text so that it matches the size of devices that users employ to browse your website.
Studies have found that most people scan website text in an F shaped pattern. Make use of it by placing more important items at the top and left side of the page. This pattern works best for page containing text such as blogs and sale pages.
4- Mobile Friendly
Today people use their phones and other devices to browse the web more than before. So, it is very important to optimize your website for mobile devices. Your design should look equally good on any screen size, otherwise, you are going to lose a lot of customers.
There are many guidelines on the internet that can help you turn your website into a responsive and user-friendly one. Three simple rules of mobile-friendly design:
• Easy to read text
• Easy to navigate
• Enjoyable user experience
5- Load Time in Australia
Most Australians expect their websites to load in the blink of an eye. Otherwise, they will leave your website and never come back. So, if you don’t want to lose the battle to your competitors optimize your site for speed. You can boost loading time of your website by compressing images and other resources, using a CDN or bundling several CSS and JavaScript files into a central file which reduces HTTP requests to the server.
But remember the most important factor in the site loading time is the server latency. Why don’t migrate to a faster hosting service?
A simplistic and responsive design, easy navigation, readable and compelling content as well as fast loading time are the five pillars for effective and professional web design.
