Top Web Design Principles for 2024
Table of Contents
Introduction
With so many people buying goods and services from the internet it makes sense for your business to have a website. It is your shop window, and you want to make it appealing and professional to attract customers. Having a website for business:
- Makes a good first impression
- Builds Trust
- Showcases your offering
- Gives you the opportunity to engage your target audience
Having a website also helps with search engine optimisation. If you’re selling a product or providing a service, having a website helps you reach out to a wider audience, not just people who live locally.
A website isn’t only there to tell people about your products or services. A website needs to be professionally designed to make it functional and appealing. This blog will go into detail about the top 10 web desig priciples you need to be including on your website!
Colour
Colour is important on a website because it helps to focus the reader’s attention on essential information. A reader will process information more efficiently if you use colour rather than black and white.
When you are thinking about the colours to use on your website, you could try and use some psychology. Yes, really! Colours can influence the way a customer feels about your website and your brand as a whole. Here are some reasons that colour in web design is so important to consider:
Aesthetic Appeal: Colour is one of the first things users notice when they visit a website. It can create a visually pleasing and memorable experience. Well-chosen colours can make a website attractive and inviting, while poor colour choices can have the opposite effect.
Branding: Colour is a crucial part of a brand’s identity. Consistent use of colours on a website helps reinforce the brand’s image and message. When users see these colours, they associate them with the brand, so it is important to choose your brand colours wisely!
Emotional Impact: Colours evoke emotional responses. Red might convey urgency or passion, while blue can communicate trust and professionalism. Designers use colour psychology to elicit specific emotions and feelings from website visitors. Take a look at our graphic below that tells you the kind of emotions each colour inflicts!
User Experience: Colours can impact how users perceive and interact with a website. For example, using high contrast between text and background colours enhances readability. Colour can also be used to guide users’ attention to specific elements or call-to-action buttons that you want your customers to click on.
Navigation and Hierarchy: Similarly, colour is an effective way to establish visual hierarchy. Using different colours for headings, subheadings, and body text helps users quickly identify the structure and content of a web page. Notice how the colour of each heading on this article is different? This is all done on purpose to distinguish between sections of information.
Accessibility: Web designers must consider the accessibility of their websites. Proper colour choices ensure that content is readable and understandable for all users, including those with visual impairments. This includes adhering to contrast guidelines and using colour combinations that work for everyone.
Consistency: Maintaining a consistent colour scheme across a website makes it feel cohesive and professional. This consistency helps users navigate the site and understand its structure.
Call To Action Buttons
CTAs prompt users to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or contacting the company. They are the gateway to user engagement and interaction with your website. Well-designed CTAs should stand out from other page elements in order to attract the attention of your customers to ensure that they don’t get lost or distracted on the page.
One of the primary purposes of many websites is to convert visitors into customers, subscribers, or leads. CTA buttons play a central role in this process by encouraging users to take the desired action. They can provide a nudge to users who might be hesitant to take the next step. Whether it’s a “Learn More” button that encourages further exploration or a “Buy Now” button that nudges users toward a purchase, CTAs help customers overcome hesitation.
It is important to consider that With the increasing use of mobile devices, responsive CTA design is crucial. CTAs need to be well-designed and easily tappable on smaller screens, ensuring a seamless user experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
Take a look below at all the different types of CTAs:
Navigation
Navigation is essential for providing a smooth and user-friendly experience. It helps visitors find the information they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.
Your user should not have to search through your website to find what they are after, and you should aim to make your customer journey as seamless as possible. A well-structured navigation system reduces frustration and encourages users to stay on your website rather than go to a competitors.
Alongside this, effective navigation ensures that your website is accessible to a broad range of users, including those with disabilities. Properly labelled and structured navigation links are essential for screen readers and assistive technologies, making your site inclusive and compliant with accessibility standards.
Having good navigation can help your conversions. An effective navigation system will naturally guide users toward specific actions or conversion points. For example, well-placed call-to-action buttons in the navigation menu can increase the likelihood of users taking desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
Top Tip: Did you know that navigation can affect your SEO? Search engines consider the structure and labelling of navigation menus when indexing your website, so a clear and well-organised navigation system can improve your SEO ranking!
Linking
Creating links from one page to another helps SEO and also makes it easy for your customer to get to the pages they want to read. For example, a call to action on your home page may link to your contact page if you want your reader to fill in a contact form. Or you might have a blog with a link back to a product page. Linking in this way is called internal linking.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics are important in website design because it influences the way your reader perceives the website. A design that’s easy to skim with a clear layout will make your website credible and garner trust from your readers.
Good Content
Any content on a website should be easy to read and conversational. Writing as you talk is good advice. Make sure each page of your website is telling your reader what you do and what you are selling. Don’t just write a long screed of text. A website designer will tell you it is best to create paragraphs and white space so that the content is easy on the eye. It should be laid out like this blog post with plenty of paragraphs.
You can also use headings and bullet points to break up the text. This will mean your customers can skim the text if they are in a hurry. People like to read a friendly, personable text so use the second person and address your reader as ‘you’, as we have done in this blog.
You should also add keywords and phrases to help search optimisation. Your designer might know an SEO specialist who can help you, or you can use one of the many free SEO keyword tools. Add them naturally to your text. If you don’t want to write your own content, ask your web designer if they offer this service or hire a content writer.
After the design stage, when your website is live you may want to add more content to help SEO. A great plugin to use is YOAST. If you are an SEO beginner Yoast will help you to get your text optimised by using a traffic light system. If you get a green button on your content, it means it has been optimised. Yoast tells you what you need to do to get from red to green.
Typography
Typography is important in web design because it helps to make the website look attractive and professional. Using the right font makes a difference as to whether your website can be read easily or not.
Images
Images make your website more attractive, and they can be used to draw in your reader so that they will read your web content.
The photos you use on your website can be paid for images or those that you can download free of charge from many of the many image companies on the internet.
Mobile Compatability
According to Statista, there are 4.32 billion active mobile internet users in the world. A lot of people make purchases or book services using a phone rather than a computer. Just look on buses and trains when you are out and about to see how many people use their phones for browsing. This is why it is important that your website can be viewed perfectly on all electronic devices, especially mobile phones.
If a reader can’t see a page properly, they won’t spend the time scrolling or clicking through to other pages, they will just find a better website.
Importance of Web Design for Business
The importance of web design in business starts off with that first impression. Think about when you are strolling around a physical shop. Your eyes will be drawn to the display with the attractive design. It’s the same for a web site.
A potential customer needs to be drawn in and engaged with your brand before they buy. Presenting a professional well-designed website will do just that. An appealing websites draws the reader in and helps them to easily navigate from page to page. Well-written content explains what you do and call to action buttons lead them towards the action you want them to take.
Conclusion
Having these top web design principles on your website are crucial for businesses to succeed in the modern day. These steps are here to help you set up of your account and start your journey through the online jungle! Whilst it might feel intimidating at the beginning, sticking to a cohesive plan like this can make the process a whole lot easier!
These have been our top web design principles and we hope they have been helpful to you!
Take a look at our Youtube Channel to hear more about web design and other similar videos:
Let us know in the comments which of these tips you’ll be implementing into your marketing strategy and tell us your number 1 web design principle to help each other out!
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