These days, just about anyone can easily launch a website. But that doesn’t mean it will work for your business just as good as it does for others.
An effective website design should fulfill its intended purpose by engaging the visitor and communicating its specific message. But a good website design is influenced by several elements, including consistency, colours, typography, imagery, simplicity, and functionality.
Even with the amount of work that that entails, the design of your website matters more to conversions than you might realise. It won’t matter how many conversion-boosting strategies you use if your website’s design is only marginally above average. Design is not something that only designers are subjected to. It’s a way of marketing.
A well-designed website can encourage users to take action by fostering trust. Making sure your website design is optimised for usability and functionality is a crucial part of creating a fantastic user experience.
Creating a website with an impressive user interface will increase your conversion rate, which will boost your sales and revenue. However, before starting to build one, you should first understand the core principles of web design and the benefits it is expected to bring to your business.
Importance of Good and Responsive Web Design
In case you weren’t aware, responsive design is a web design that aims to improve user experience by making pages render correctly on different devices. Reducing the need for pointless resizing, scrolling, and zooming on websites that are not mobile-friendly is the goal of a responsive web design.
When a website has a responsive design, you can access it on various screen sizes and device types while still seeing the same content. Simply put, shifting to a responsive web design is developing websites and pages that automatically adjust their display and layout to the device being used to view them.
Why is a responsive web design crucial for businesses, then? Because you want to reach your customer where they are. As of May 2022, mobile users now account for 58.26% of all internet traffic.
Aside from making sure your web design improves the user experience, having a good and responsive web design is also important because it can affect your SEO strategy, help maintain consistency, and can set you apart from your competition.
Principles of Web Design You Should Know About
Only when a website is properly built can it help your business. A website’s design and information must appeal to users for it to work in line with business goals.
The website design principles to keep in mind when planning your business’s next web project are listed below.
Purpose of the Website
The needs of the user are always taken into account in a good web design. Each page should have a straightforward goal to help the user find out about what you have to offer.
What does your website aim to achieve? Websites may serve a variety of purposes, but they all share the following fundamental goals:
- Defining Expertise
- Creating a Solid Reputation
- Generating Leads
- Sales and Follow-Ups
User Understanding
The quality of the user experience on your website matters. Making sure website visitors can complete their tasks in the quickest and least frustrating manner is your main goal when designing your website.
You must take into account your audience’s requirements, expectations, abilities, constraints, and yes, even cultural differences. You can do this by looking into the demographics of your users, tracking their behaviour, and speaking with them directly.
Accessibility
This is yet another crucial idea to keep in mind when designing a website. Each section of your website must be accessible to visitors. The website must be simple to use and have clear navigation. Users can learn more about your business and its products thanks to this; and if they think your offerings are a good fit to their needs, they should be able to buy them from your platform right away.
Navigation
On websites, navigation is the wayfinding system that users interact with to find what they are looking for. Maintaining visitors on a website requires good navigation. Visitors will give up trying to use a website if the navigation is difficult to use and they may look elsewhere for the information they seek. The key is to keep the navigation clear, make it easy to use, and keep it consistent throughout each page.
Simplicity
When thinking about how to improve your website’s usability and user experience, simplicity is the best approach. Here are some strategies for designing with simplicity.
- Colour – You can use cool and straightforward colour schemes to help website visitors understand your message. You can sway your users’ perceptions of your brand by using the right colour schemes, too .
- Imagery – Visual elements like photos, videos, illustrations, and much more are included in imagery. The images you use on your website must be engaging and accurately representing your business and its products. As a result, the visitors will have a more positive perception of your credibility and professionalism.
- Typography – The brand’s message can be visually interpreted through typography. It attracts attention and is essential for generally maintaining users’ interest.
- White Space – Another element that adds to your website’s simplicity is white space. It helps you reduce the website’s cognitive load and makes it simpler for users to read the information provided there. Even complicated hierarchical structures can appear straightforward with the help of white space.
Content
Both great design and clear content are found on an effective website. Great content can attract and influence visitors by turning them into customers by using compelling language.
Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy can be thought of as the direction in which our eyes move and what we see. Before creating a sequence for all the visual elements to be placed in, you must first determine the relative importance of each of your various topics.
Grid-Based Layouts
Grids support design and content organisation makes the page look neat and aligns the elements on the page. A website’s appearance is improved by the grid-based layout, which organises content into a neat, rigid grid structure with columns and sections that feel balanced and impose order.
F-Pattern Reading
According to some studies, people scan computer screens in an “F” pattern. The top and left are where most people look, and the right side is rarely seen. An expertly designed website works with the reader’s natural behaviour and presents information in order of importance rather than attempting to force the viewer into a visual flow.
Page Load Time
A website will lose visitors if they wait too long just for it to load. Nearly half of website visitors anticipate that a page will load in two seconds or less, and they may leave if it takes longer than three. Optimising image sizes is one of the many ways to speed up the loading of your website.
Mobile-Friendliness
The majority of website visitors don’t always have a desktop or laptop handy. Your website must be mobile-friendly because people try to access websites using their mobile devices most of the time. Make sure your website can adapt to different screen types and sizes.
Business Edge With a Professionally Designed Website
Making a DIY website is simpler than ever before. There are many services where you can sign up for a very low price and create a website for your business by simply dragging and dropping features and widgets. However, there are many benefits to having a professional web design agency create your website as opposed to doing it yourself.
Here are some benefits of having a professionally designed website:
Builds a Strong First Impression
Amateur websites can come off as unprofessional and undermine your credibility among potential customers. Making your website with the help of experts during the design and development will guarantee a strong and engaging first impression.
Boosts Customer Trust and Your Credibility
People won’t trust your site if it has a poor design or if the information appears to be outdated. When your website doesn’t have an updated web design, they might think it’s seedy or outright shady.
A professionally designed website, on the other hand, communicates credibility to your audience. It can bolster confidence in your company and make users feel at ease checking its content further.
Keep Up With Competition
You need a cutting-edge website if you want to outperform competitors. The most recent design trends must be incorporated, and the website copy must be persuasive and engaging to direct visitors to a particular call to action. This will put you ahead of your competition but this requires marketing expertise that the majority of DIY-ers lack.
Your Bounce Rate
The ideal scenario is for site visitors to explore your website further and learn more about what your business has to offer. This can involve engaging them to look at case studies, reviews, and the range of services you offer. Having a professionally designed website helps decrease the bounce rate, indeed.
Improves Search Rankings
Google takes a business’s investment in its website very seriously. Therefore, you must properly invest in a website if you want to maintain top search engine rankings. To achieve a high ranking, make sure its design ticks all the boxes that Google likes to see, too.
Provides Simple and Easy Modifications
A professional website design will give you the foundation you need to easily add new functionality to your website if you decide to do so in the near future.
Maintains Brand Consistency
Building a consistent brand identity is crucial for increasing business credibility and dependability, and having a professional website makes it easier to tell your brand’s story and attain consistency.
Boosts Revenue
A professional, well-designed website will attract visitors and help boost revenue as a result. Simply put, a well-thought-out website will draw more visitors and help in turning those visitors into prospect customers or brand patrons. This will inevitably result in an increase in revenue for your business. A professionally designed website is, indeed, a wise investment if you want to increase sales.
Build Your Professionally Designed Website Now!
There is a lot of information here, but the key lesson is that you can’t just create a website in a jiffy and leave it be afterwards if you want to see tangible business results. In fact, opting for a DIY website builder can only take you so far.
So if you want to build a website that contributes to your business goals and works beyond a lead-generating asset, have your website built by a professional Melbourne web design agency.
