Your website is like your virtual store. It is the first impression of your business on your visitors. And if it’s that important, you must put your time and effort to design it well.
Designing an effective website is simple, it is just not easy. I mean, the design principles are well known and there are so many expert designers and resources available; but it just takes a lot of thought and brainstorming. It is better that you decide the design/branding part for your website because it is your website, after all.
To help you with this, here are the 7 design principles that I’ve learned through the designing of my own websites like Socinova, Floma and TrigacyDigital:
1. Don’t design while developing, but design and then develop.
The first thing I recommend is to design the website first and then develop. Most of the people try to do designing and developing together which leads to frequent changes in the website coding. And this costs time and money.
Having your design ready first helps to bring down the time required for trial and error while coding and also makes the developing easy. You can always make changes to the developed website, so there’s nothing to worry about.
2. Think about your brand consistency.
Your website is the reflection of your brand so just having a standard theme for it, is not recommended. If you’re creating a web-app platform or a content website, then I suggest you go with full custom design as per your needs. If you’re creating a corporate or portfolio website, then you may start with a theme and then go on customising.
Whichever option you choose, your website must be consistent with your overall branding. Your logo, colours, graphics, fonts, writing style should be consistent throughout the website.
Learn more about brand consistency here.
3. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Use it.
There’s no need to think that complicated websites signify ‘professionalism or expertise’ of designing. Complex websites only make it hard for users to figure out the website functionality and make them leave the site.
Remember this famous line- Simple is good.
Yes, you should have all the required features for your website even if they are not so easy to understand to average users, but the navigation, user interface and functioning of the website should always be easy to comprehend.
4. Make important things obvious to understand.
Yes, you love your website and know every bit of it. But a first-time visitor may not.
Your website’s call to action, menu and page navigation should be so obvious that even a first time visitor should understand it quickly. To achieve this, you can have your menu both at the top of the page and footer, add ‘sign up’ or other call-to-action buttons on required places, have easy to understand URLs like yourwebsite.com/example, etc.
5. Make it mobile responsive.
It’s 2016 and to keep your website accessible from every device, you must make it responsive. A responsive website can be seen conveniently on mobile and tablets, giving your website a benefit of reaching users on mobile.
But remember: this is a tip, not necessarily a rule. I mean, yes the number of mobile users accessing websites is greater than ever but this doesn’t necessarily mean they are trying to access your website. If you have a B2B corporate website and all your users access your website from desktops, then there’s no need to put the effort in building a responsive site.
6. Today the world is social. Put it to work.
Nobody can deny the importance of social media in digital marketing. To make your website successful on social media, you should add social icons, social share buttons to your website encouraging users to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and share your content. Search engines take social signals into consideration when deciding rankings and now even your tweets are indexed into Google.
More shares and followers for your website on social media will only mean more popularity over time and ultimately, more business.
Learn more tips to increase social shares for your website here.
7. Take care of the technical things too.
Steve Jobs has famously said: Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
And it’s true. Just having a visually appealing website does not mean it’ll be successful. Your SEO friendliness, page loading time, technologies used for coding, SSL certificate, domain name choice, etc. all matters. Make sure you’ve given enough thought to the technical side of things also because in the long run, not only well designed but also well-developed websites succeed.
I hope this list of design tips will help you make a better website. If you’ve designed a website or have some tips for designing, why not share them in comments? I would love to hear your thoughts!
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