Designing an effective website is more than just making sure a page looks good and ranks high on a Google search. For a website design to work, there needs to be a seamless blend of form, function and an ability to immediately engage visitors from whichever page they land on.
Below are five fundamental design principles that every website should have.
Strong Goals & Objectives
Why does the website exist? What purpose does it serve? These are pivotal questions that should be answered before embarking on a web development project. There is no ‘right’ answer to the questions, as each business is different but the fact that if they want the website to work for them they have to know why they are making it remains the same across any company in any industry.
Consistent Branding
Customers and clients should be able to recognise a business, whether they go into a shop or office or digitally engage with the organisation. This is where hiring a full service agency like simple.com.au can be really effective as the brand identity can be creatively applied across all communication mediums and customer touch points.
Usability
No matter how the site looks aesthetically, it is crucial to ensure that it works on any browser on any device and has user friendly functionality and intuitive navigation. It should be easy for customers to do business with them from the website and find their way around to what they need. Consider how readable it is as well – while dark backgrounds often create impact, text on a black background (even when in a contrasting colour) can be difficult to read
Meet Expectations
There are some things that just are on the internet – for example, underlined or coloured text is generally reserved for hyperlinks; boxes typically mean that someone can free type into the field and if there are photographs of stock, people assume that there will also be relevant information to accompany them like pricing, dimensions etc. Some rules are not meant to be broken, so no matter how unconventional or creative a site design is, sticking to the standard and accepted practices is still important.
It Should Load Quickly and Not Take up Too Much Data
More and more people are shunning the desktop and laptop computers of times gone by and relying only on mobile devices and this is crucial for designers to keep in mind. Mobile users want their information to be rapidly accessible, and they don’t wait around as long as a desktop user does for a page to load. Consider the fact that many of the site’s visitors will be using the mobile phone network or public WiFi to access the page and design accordingly.
Other basic design principles like descriptive page titles, engaging and effective copy written for the user not the search engine, and effective use of white space are also still important when it comes to how the site is going to look and perform – but those elements need to be applied after these five considerations have been addressed.
What do you think are the basics of effective and emphatic web design?
