A well-designed website should serve its purpose by engaging the visitor and delivering the message it was meant to. A great website design is influenced by a number of elements, including consistency, colors, font, images, simplicity, and usefulness.
Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing. The design showcases your product’s functionality. The more you understand the fundamentals of web design, the better your outcomes will be.
Making an excellent website is sometimes difficult. There are a ton of websites online, but excellent ones are rare. People use the internet extensively for a variety of purposes, including online shopping, food delivery, website exploration for their education, reading articles from other websites, and much more.
What Is Web Design?
The term “web design” describes the layout of websites that are seen online. Instead of software development, it often refers to the user experience components of website development. The primary emphasis of web design used to be creating websites for desktop browsers, but from the middle of the 2010s, designing for mobile and tablet browsers has gained significance.
What Are Website Design Fundamentals?
Design fundamentals are based on input from experts in a variety of fields, including psychology, behavioral science, and more. These fundamentals, which are often flexible regulations, help designers create successfully finished goods. They have an impact on the features that are ordered and the components that are picked or skipped.
Fundamentals for Building a Great Web Design
Proper website design doesn’t come easy. Follow these effective web design fundamentals to make your next project a success.
- Simplicity
We’ve already said that simple sites tend to work best. They stand out the most and give users the best experience and engagement. Because of this, one of the design fundamentals is to keep things simple.
Websites can sometimes be too well made. Putting too many things on a page can make it hard for people to see what the main point of your website is. Keeping things simple is the key to making a website that looks nice and is easy to use and understand. But it takes skill and control to use simplicity so that your website doesn’t look bland and boring.
Simple websites should make it easy to move from one page to the next and read any content without getting distracted or confused.
- F-based Reading Pattern
The most popular pattern used by website visitors to scan content is the F-based pattern. According to eye tracking research, individuals tend to focus mostly on the top and left of the screen. The F-shaped layout imitates the way we naturally read in the West (left to right and top to bottom). An effectively designed website will work with a reader’s natural pattern of scanning the page.
- Visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is the way that things are put together to show how important they are. This is done with size, color, imagery, contrast, typography, white space, texture, and style. One of the most important things that visual hierarchy does is create a focal point. This shows visitors where the most important information is.
- Keep Your Design Consistent
Consistency is important when designing a website. Pay close attention to how the design components on each page fit up. It’s clear that your website’s fonts, sizes, headings, subheadings, and button styles must all be the same. Make plans for everything. Set the fonts and colors for your text, buttons, etc., and use them throughout the development process. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are useful for keeping track of all the details about design styles and elements.
- Same Color Scheme
When putting together the website’s knowledge hierarchy, color is very important. One of the hardest things to do is to keep the color scheme the same. Sometimes, a color we like might not be a color that other people like. Many times, you have to choose between two colors. Make sure the color you choose is one that most people like. Some colors might work well with a certain text, while others might not. The goal here is to stay consistent. Run a survey, test, and keep going until users give you good feedback. Your website’s color scheme must be the same everywhere!
- Easy Navigation
This is one of the most important parts of designing a website, or one of the most important rules to follow. If your site is hard to use, people will leave it and probably never come back. Easy navigation means having a simple menu layout and being able to move quickly around the website.
- Keep Your Audience in Mind
Good designers know that making a website that they think looks good is not enough. To make a website that stands out online, they need to design it so that it speaks directly to their audience. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and think about their biggest needs, wants, and fears. This should guide all of your design decisions, from the fonts and colors you use to the text on your buttons and how people get around your site.
- Content
What’s on a website is what makes it good or bad. A website doesn’t do anything without content. Without a goal, there’s no reason for people to come to your site. Content needs to be shown off on a website for it to work well. Make sure that your content looks good and is easy to read and understand. The way you use language can take your web design to the next level and even affect the people who visit your site. The goal is for visitors to become paying customers.
- Load Time
People who use the Internet have come to expect websites to load in less than a few seconds. Make sure that when you design your site, you don’t include things like large, high-resolution images that could slow down page load times. If your website takes a long time to load, people are likely to leave. This is especially true if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Make sure that any images you use are optimized. Your website’s load time is also a big part of your SEO score. Google and other search engines punish sites that take longer to load.
- Grid Based Layout
Grids help give your design structure and keep your content in order. The grid helps put things in the right place and keeps the page clean. The grid-based layout puts content into a clean, rigid grid with columns and sections that line up and feel balanced. This makes for a website that looks good.
- Communication
The visitors’ main goal is to gather information. Your visitors will likely spend more time on your website if you can connect with them effectively. Utilizing headings, sub-headlines, and bullet points to organize the material will help you communicate with visitors in an easy-to-understand
- Mobile Compatibility
Keeping in mind that the number of people using smartphones and tablets is growing, websites need to be set up correctly for different screens. If your website’s design doesn’t work on all screen sizes, it’s likely that your competitors will beat you. Make sure the company you hire to design and build your website can do responsive web design.
- Managing Focus On User’s Attention
Visual elements need to be put in the right places for web design to work well. When graphic design elements are used correctly, they create an open, inviting path to conversions. Elements of design can be very clear, like arrows, or very subtle. These design elements act as guides that help people look where they need to look. The eyes should only be able to focus on one design element at a time, and calls to action should be carefully placed. These are important factors that must be carefully planned and carried out to get high conversion rates.
Conclusion:
With these fundamentals in mind, it’s easy to make websites that are easy to use and work well. Without these basics, it is hard to make a good website that is easy to use. Focusing on a design that is easy to use and intuitive is always a good way to go. AppleTech can help you in building your website by keeping all the above-mentioned web design fundamentals in mind. AppleTech’s web design and development professionals can assist you with your website design and development needs.
