Good web design should be able to guide the user to find what they want easily (or what you want them to find), and to engage the user as best as possible to keep them from clicking away.
To achieve this for your website there are some key areas to work on, which we will delve into below:
Images / Videos
Images are a massive part of what makes an attractive website, high quality images can often account for 50% of the overall design. In this day and age with everything being mass produced and ai generated, it’s more valuable than ever to have genuine images of your own.
So invest a bit of money in a decent photographer. We do have our own photographer and videographer, who can capture some quality shots to help sell the message you want to customers. Get in touch with us to find out more >
Fonts
Fonts are often a subtle aspect of design that you might not even notice, but can really help to communicate your message more clearly.
The font itself needs to be on brand and match the feel of the site, only using 1 or 2 at the most. You then have line height, padding, alignment, capitalisation, bolden / lighten, colour and font sizing that can all be tweaked to help smarten up the layout and also highlight key elements.
A simple block of text may look dull just plonked on the page, but pull out certain sections of the text and use as a nice title, bolden certain words, give sub titles, add additional padding, maybe a different background colour etc etc and suddenly that dull text has engagement!
Padding
Good padding is key to a good design, if everything is squashed together then it becomes a mess, no matter how well it maybe designed. At the same time, if you overdo the padding then elements get lost and confused. Padding helps to group or separate elements. Breaking sections of the page up with different padded elements, such as coloured backgrounds, images and text helps everything to flow and read well.
Positioning
Where elements are placed on your site is crucial for user experience and getting a potential customer to do what you want them to do when visiting your site.
For instance; important information about what you do and who you are should be near the top, how to contact you visible throughout, any evidence, reviews and reasons why further down, menus on the right hand side where the mouse or finger usually sit, social links, accreditations / partners near the bottom on each page (unless critical). Doing things in this manor brings consistency, familiarity and ease of use
Even in terms of design – positioning elements correctly and breaking content sections up so it’s not too overwhelming or confusing is critical to a clean, engaging website.
Brand
Ensuring colours, fonts, imagery, styles and the general feel and layout of the site is all kept inline with the overall company brand and ethos is key. This should all be kept consistent throughout the site to bring recognition and a strong brand presence.
You should also try to create something a little unique that’s inline with your companies brand and is different to anything else out there. This will help the website stand out and be more memorable. This could be something simple, like using the company logo in an interesting way, as a background or similar. Having unique animations or effects when someone interacts with something. Creating custom fonts, custom icons or custom graphics that play into your brand.
Colours
A great way to subliminally guide users down a certain path on your site is with the use of colour. Action buttons being in a bright, obvious colour, key parts of text in a separate colour or on a coloured background. Using bold, clean, modern colours can really elevate the design where maybe your images are lacking. Ensure colours are kept on brand and use around 2, maybe 3 max, utilising a specific colour where you want to draw more attention.
Familiarity
As strange as it might seem when we’ve spoken so much about being unique and different to stand out. Fundamentally you still need the core of your site to be familiar to what people are used to. Users want to access things fast and if you annoy or confuse them with something too different or unusual to how they usually operate a site you will easily loose them. So keep things as familiar as possible – such as logo top left, menu top right, burger menu on mobile, obvious title at the top, content in the middle, clear text, footer at the bottom etc etc. This may sound obvious, but thinking too far out of the box could cost you, no matter how forward thinking you think it is.
Modern Trends
It’s important to keep up with the latest web trends and innovations that might be around to improve user experience. You don’t need to copy them or use every idea on your site, but being aware of different options means you can implement a great idea when it suits.
Using modern and interesting ideas that work also makes you look more professional and memorable, two of the key things you want from your website.
Device Friendly
The final point is about device compatibility. Thought has to go into how the design will work on different screens – both in terms of look and accessibility. These days, there are so many ways people might be viewing your website – from a wide screen TV, wide desktop monitors, square desktop monitors and even vertical desktop monitors, to tablets, iPhones, androids and more. Then there’s the various different web browsers and apps used to display the site with.
Care has to first go into how the design will be responsive to these different formats and then testing also needs to happen during the build phase the ensure the site works correctly and when moved around and between browsers.
