Website design needs the designer to carefully consider elements and how they fit in with the overall website, its message, and the business’ branding. We’ve listed 10 principles or commandants for you to follow to ensure you have considered all the potential things that are required to build the perfect website.
Intention
A well-considered website will help you meet the end user’s needs. Consider that your visitors are searching for content, entertainment, interaction, or are they trying to transact Each web page requires a clear strategy to deliver information in an efficient way to satisfy your customers’ needs.
Communication
Consumers want to consume information as fast as possible and it is essential that your website can provide an experience that caters to that need. Best practice includes organising information into an easy to digest format so that visitors can understand your website and the information easily.
Typeface
Readability is essential and using a good font a good set of fonts makes it much easier to achieve good readability. Sans serif fonts are modern fonts without the fancy finishes and easy to read are being used more often in modern websites. The optimal font size for easy on-line reading is 16 pixels, heading sizes vary depending on the website layout and mobile sizes vary too depending on other factors.
Colours
A well-conceived range of colours will help to improve the user experience. Having a set of complementary colours will produce equilibrium and harmony The use of contrasting text and background colours helps guide the eye to view the call to action or important information. Using contrasting and clashing colours sparingly as they can make the page become an eyesore. The aim here is to mix functionality with aesthetics. Finally, empty white space gives you a contemporary and open-plan look but make sure you don’t overdo it and have a completely empty page.
Images
A good image can say more than words can on a website as visitors are sometimes too lazy to read. It needs to be well-positioned and be relevant to your branding, and in doing so, it will help you connect with your target demographic. Consider purchasing stock photos or royalty-free images to improve the look of your website if your budget doesn’t allow for custom professional images. Info-graphics, videos, and icons will communicate much more effectively than the text as previously explained. For free images that are also royalty free, Pexels and Pixabay are amazing places to search.
Navigation
The way in which users navigate and move around a website depends on the simplicity of the sitemap and navigation of your website. Having a logical hierarchy of parent pages and sub-pages, having clickable buttons, using breadcrumbs, and search are all required within a website’s strategy for effective navigation. If you want to spice it up a notch, check out examples of different website navigation.
Grid Layout
If you place blocks of content randomly on your internet page, you can well end up a mess. Most websites utilise a grid layout which consists of columns and boxes that are structured in doing so its leads to a well-balanced website.
Viewing Direction
Studies monitoring the movement of eyes whilst they were staring at a screen found that individuals are scanning the pattern F when scanning for information. People generally view from top-down whilst going in a leftward direction of the display, and rarely can be seen on the correct side of the monitor. Instead of forcing the viewer to go against nature, the website design should flow visually and operate in sync with a reader’s natural viewing behaviour.
Loading Speed
Having a fast loading website will require optimising images for size and with compression, combining CSS, Javascript, minifying HTML, CSS, and Javascript as well as implementing the use of a content delivery network or CDN such as Cloudflare. If you’re not sure how fast your website is, test your website’s speed on Pingdom from Sydney.
Mobile Responsive
It is extremely common for visitors to access your website from various devices such as phones or tablets so mobile responsiveness is a must. One method is to build in mobile responsive elements so that the website adjusts according to the screen size. The other method is to have a separate subdomain “m.yourwebsite.com.au” which houses the mobile version of that website. If you’re still not sure, have a look at examples of responsive websites or our previous responsive websites.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a website designer or just someone that is building their own website, make sure you carefully consider all the elements on your website and how they play together. At Sitelabs, our professional website designers & SEO agency in Melbourne will help do the hard work for you and make sure your website is tip top.
