If you want to make a lasting impression on your website visitors, you must ensure that your website design is top-notch. A great website design is not just about looking good – it’s about making your message crystal clear and engaging your audience in a way that keeps them coming back for more.
So, whether you’re working on a brand-new website or looking to spruce up an existing one, this guide is here to help! We’ll dive into the key attributes of good web design and offer some practical tips to help you create a website that will not only look amazing but will help you achieve your goals too!
Principles of Good Website Design
A well-designed website should engage visitors while fulfilling its intended purpose of communicating a certain message. Several elements influence excellent website design, including usefulness, simplicity, graphics, typography, colors, and consistency.
There are numerous important aspects to consider while creating a website since they will influence how people view it. A well-designed website can encourage visitors to take action and aid in the development of trust. Ensuring your website design is optimized for usability (form and aesthetics) and its simplicity (functionality) is essential to creating a fantastic user experience. The following principles can assist you in planning your next web project.
Six Key Attributes of Good Web Design
A good website gives people the tools they need to do the things they set out to do and makes the user experience (UX) smooth and easy. These tips on what makes a good website will show you what that looks like, and you can use our examples to help you build your own.
1. A clear purpose
Without a defined objective, your website will fail. And when we say purpose, we really mean ‘user intent.’ Your website’s goal should be to help people complete their tasks, so make sure you understand their goals and what they want to achieve when they search for your page.
That is why it is critical to create many product personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) before developing your website. Allowing people to drive your decision-making process is essential for successfully designing and improving your website. Each of your websites should have its distinct function. Consider, ‘Why is the user going to this particular page?’ and incorporate user intent into your page style, content, and calls to action (CTAs).
2. Quality content
Your website’s quality is determined by its content. The finest websites create user-centric content that is primarily intended for its readers rather than SEO. SEO can and should play an important role in guiding your content decisions: understanding your clients’ search intent allows you to understand their demands better. Using pillar pages and subject clusters, you may investigate themes that interest your users while also developing a content structure that generates authority and helps rank in search engines such as Google.
‘Topic cluster’ postings concentrate on a specific aspect of a pillar page and frequently target a long-tail keyword (a longer, more precise keyword phrase), whereas ‘pillar pages’ offer complete overviews of topics. Link between pages within a topic cluster, and always return to your in-depth pillar page.
3. Outstanding UX and UI
One of the most important web design guidelines and ideas is to create a great user experience (UX) and user interface. Great firms consider the end-user experience from the beginning of the web design process. Consider UI as what your users see, and UX as their emotions and reactions when using your site.
Simple and cohesive homepage, with interactive components that keep users interested while demonstrating how the product works. For a fantastic UI, make sure your design is clean and consistent, and don’t be afraid to use white space. Include entertaining components such as films and animations, but avoid overwhelming consumers with eye candy.
Strong UX design is all about providing a smooth user experience. Is your website well-organized? Simple to navigate? Is it accessible to users who have limitations, such as vision impairment? Consider your consumers’ navigation demands and how you might design a product experience that allows them to do what they came for.
When you build with quick, intuitive website navigation in mind, you’ll end up with a wonderful product that attracts repeat customers. To provide a great user experience, you must blend utility and aesthetics.
4. Great performance
What happens behind the scenes is equally important as what users see; thus, addressing efficiency is one of the most critical web design best practices to implement. Website monitoring is critical for excellent product performance; therefore, check for bugs and broken links on a regular basis and ensure that your site is crawlable by search engines.
5. Multi-device optimization
Almost half of all web traffic now originates from mobile devices. Accordingly, you should ensure that your website is responsive, meaning that it looks good on desktop, mobile, and tablet screens.
Regardless of the device a user is using to visit your site, you should adjust the size and placement of images and ensure that your navigation menus display correctly across all screen sizes. One helpful hint is to compare the behaviour of desktop and mobile users on your site using Hotjar Heatmaps and Session Recordings. This will help you enhance your site’s responsiveness and usability.
6. High Security
An important component of every high-quality website is its ability to keep its customers safe. Secure hosting, SSL certificates, and multi-factor authentication are the very minimum that great website owners utilize to keep their visitors’ sensitive information safe. The security of online payment systems and consumers’ financial data on financial technology platforms is paramount. For your users to feel comfortable using your website the most, you must ensure their data is secure.
Ending Remarks
If you want to attract and keep visitors to your website, you need to consider good website design. To achieve this, you should focus on some key principles like having a clear purpose, providing high-quality content, creating an outstanding UX/UI, ensuring great performance, optimizing for multi-devices, and enhancing security.
By implementing these guidelines, you can create a website that not only looks stunning but also offers a seamless user experience. With such a website, you’ll be able to effectively communicate your message, engage your audience, and accomplish your online goals easily.
