One could say that web design is a blend of creativity and functionality where every pixel matters.
Creating a website that seamlessly combines visual appeal with smooth navigation requires a delicate balance.
To help you achieve this, we have compiled a list of 10 web design tips for you to consider as you learn how to create a website:
Maintain visual consistency
Develop a clear visual hierarchy
Design with ample white space
Ensure intuitive navigation
Avoid overloading pages with too much text
Highlight your call-to-action buttons
Use a mobile-responsive design
Focus on your website's speed
Design with accessibility in mind
Leave a lasting impression
1. Maintain visual consistency
Maintaining consistency in design, color scheme, font usage, and images helps users feel comfortable and focus on the reason they visited your website. Since it helps define your brand's identity, visual consistency can even foster feelings of familiarity and trust in visitors. To maintain visual consistency:
Stick to a color palette for your page: Limit your color choices to a palette of three to five colors that complement each other and reflect your brand's personality. Use these colors consistently throughout your website, marketing, and social media.
Limit font variety: Choose one or two fonts for your website and stick to them across all pages. Ensure the selected fonts are legible and align with your brand's tone and style.
Align images with your brand's style: Use images that convey your brand's personality and style. Consider using filters, visual themes, or specific types of images to maintain a consistent look and feel.
The web page design panel in the Wix Editor makes it easy to maintain visual consistency, as the AI designer will automatically adjust the entire page to fit your choices. In the Themes section, you can choose from preset color palettes and text themes or create one that aligns with your brand guidelines.
2. Develop a clear hierarchy
In the context of web design, hierarchy plays a crucial role in guiding users through your page and ensuring they can quickly gather the most important information.
By strategically ordering content based on its importance and significance, you can create a visual flow that aligns with the typical reading behavior of the user.
This ensures that even those who don't read every word or don't scroll to the bottom of the page capture the important details. Once you've determined what is most important, use these web design tips to make the hierarchy clear:
Define your goals: To determine the hierarchy of a webpage, you must clearly define your goals and rank them based on their importance. The page hierarchy should align with that classification, and the dominant elements of the hierarchy should help you fulfill the most important goals.
Place the most important content at the top of the page: The top area of the page (also known as above-the-fold) sets expectations for the rest of the page. Visitors understand what the page is about by scanning the content at the top. As a result, the content at the top of the page is much more likely to grab the user's attention than content available upon scrolling.
Use headers, color, element size, and visual cues: In addition to your webpage's layout and positioning, designers use various visual elements to make a page's hierarchy more noticeable. Headers help structure and label content, while color and element size can be used to create focal points. Utilize visual design tools like color contrast and white space to guide users' attention to the most important elements of the page.
3. Design with ample white space
Think about what happens when you enter a cluttered room: you may feel stress, or you might become overwhelmed and distracted. A cluttered webpage can have an equally unpleasant effect. Ensuring that each fold has ample white space (also known as negative space or the unmarked or empty areas between elements) can help reduce visual noise and provide users with a more comfortable browsing experience. These tips will help you implement this widely recommended practice in web design:
Group content strategically: White space serves as a valuable tool to group content and distinguish between related and unrelated elements. The principle of proximity reinforces this concept, stating that people perceive things that are close to each other as related. By strategically placing elements close together, designers create visual associations, making it easier for users to understand relationships and navigate smoothly through the content.
Use grid-based layouts: Grids are a fundamental element of modern web design as they help designers distribute elements (including white space) on a webpage. Wix's strips and columns can be helpful when constructing a grid for your webpage.
Establish margins and padding: Adequately sized margins and padding contribute to a balanced and visually pleasing design. Define those that are appropriate around your content, ensuring that important elements have enough space to breathe.
4. Make navigation intuitive.
According to Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience, users develop mental models about how websites work based on their past experience. Straying too far from those models can confuse them and hinder their ability to find what they need. Therefore, your navigation system is not the right place to get creative. It should be as familiar and predictable as possible to avoid confusing visitors and make it easy for them to find what they need.
Here are some practices you can follow:
Follow the three-click rule: An intuitive navigation system caters to the needs of its users. Therefore, you should define the ultimate goals of your visitors before designing your website. Once done, use the three-click rule to ensure that visitors can reach each goal without unnecessary complications. This rule states that users should be able to find the desired information in less than three clicks. If you struggle to make this work, consider creating a mega menu, which accommodates more sections and subsections than a regular navigation menu.
Incorporate breadcrumb navigation: If your page has many layers, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs can prevent users from getting lost. This navigation aid shows the path a user took to arrive at their position within a website's structure. By displaying the navigation route, you make it easier for visitors to get an idea of your page's structure.
Use a hamburger menu for mobile navigation: To optimize your page when visited from mobile devices, consider reducing your website's header to your logo and a hamburger menu button (three stacked horizontal lines). This is a common tool for hiding menus and saving valuable screen space while providing easy access to navigation options.
Use clear labels: Ensure that links and category labels are descriptive and straightforward, conveying their purpose without ambiguity. Avoid using jargon or confusing terms.
5. Avoid overloading pages with too much text
When browsing the internet, people tend to scan rather than read in depth. Therefore, browsers often tolerate text-heavy content poorly. This doesn't necessarily mean you can't include a lot of text on your website (although you should limit it to what's strictly necessary). What it does mean is that the text needs to be optimized so that readers can easily find content that aligns with their goals. Here are some practical recommendations to achieve that:
Break up long blocks of text: Large and continuous blocks of text make scanning difficult. Breaking them into smaller, digestible sections, such as paragraphs of 100 to 200 words and 50 to 75 characters per line, helps users quickly find the information they need.
Connect text with visual elements: Pairing text with relevant visual elements is a standard practice in web design because countless studies have shown the picture superiority effect, stating that people understand and remember images better than words. This means that visual elements can aid in the processing, understanding, and even recall of content.
Use clear and descriptive subheadings: You'll notice that almost every article on the Wix Blog makes frequent use of subheadings. We do this not only for SEO benefits but also because our articles tend to be quite long. By using clear and descriptive subheadings, our goal is to improve the readability and organization of our posts.
6. Highlight your call-to-action buttons
Calls to action, or CTAs, are vital for encouraging visitors to take the desired action as they help guide them towards the ultimate goal. For maximum impact, ensure that CTAs are prominently placed and clearly distinguishable from the surrounding content.
Place them strategically throughout the page, in areas where users are most likely to take action.
For example, landing pages for product sales often include multiple CTA buttons so that visitors can make a purchase as soon as they are convinced. Here are some additional tips to keep in mind:
Write actionable labels for CTAs: The label you use for CTAs should motivate your customers to take the desired action. Instead of using vague labels like 'More,' use verbs like 'Buy,' 'Subscribe,' or 'Register.'
Use contrasting colors: Ensure that the color of the CTA button stands out against the background and surrounding elements.
Use animations: Consider adding subtle animations or hover effects to make the CTA more engaging.
7. Use a mobile-responsive design.
In 2022, over 60% of the global internet population used a mobile device to connect. Therefore, Google prioritizes pages with quality mobile versions. Considering these factors, it's important to optimize your website for small screens.
Tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test are useful for optimizing a website, but it's essential to be aware of the following important elements in mobile web design to get the most out of these tools:
Make your design thumb-friendly: Thumb-based interactions are much less precise than a cursor. Therefore, buttons and other interactive elements should be large enough (around 44 x 44 pixels) to be easily tapped with the thumb.
Use fonts that are easily readable on a small screen: Ensure that the font you choose for the body text of your website looks good on the screen of a small mobile device. It's better if you scale it to a size of 14px (the recommended minimum size for body text) and check if you can comfortably read the text. If not, consider changing the font to a more legible one.
Remove unnecessary visual details: Try to hide elements that may negatively impact page performance. For example, it's recommended to avoid extravagant animated effects on mobile devices because they require more computational power and do not work well on them.
8. Focus on your website's speed
Slow-loading web pages frustrate users and increase bounce rates, leading to a potential loss of traffic and customers.
According to Google, about half of users expect a website to load in two seconds or less and will abandon it if it takes more than three.
Google also considers page speed when determining its ranking in search results, so making yours faster can help increase its visibility. Here are some practical recommendations to boost your page speed:
Compress file sizes: Using modern file formats like WebP and AVIF or compressing images with tools like TinyPNG helps reduce loading times without compromising image quality.
Implement lazy loading: Lazy loading delays the loading of images and other non-essential elements until the user scrolls down to view them. This reduces the initial page loading time and improves the user experience, especially on long pages with many images.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN takes your static files (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) and places them on servers closest to the user's physical location. This reduces latency and speeds up page loading, resulting in a smoother user experience.
9. Diseña teniendo en cuenta la accesibilidad
Web accessibility is not just a nice-to-have feature; it is an ethical and practical necessity that benefits both users and businesses. Here are some recommendations to ensure accessible design:
Ensure strong color contrast: Color contrast is the brightness difference between foreground and background colors. The contrast ratio is the difference in contrast between foreground and background. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) state that a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text is needed to be visible to users with visual disabilities.
Use alternative text: People with visual impairments use screen readers to process information on a webpage. These tools rely on alternative text, or alt text, to translate images and videos to users. Therefore, adding captions and alternative text to images is crucial. Additionally, captions, along with video transcripts or closed captions, are necessary for users with hearing impairments.
Enable keyboard navigation: Some users may have difficulty using a mouse due to motor impairments, so it's essential to ensure they can access and control all interactive elements using the keyboard 'Tab' key.
10. Leave a lasting impression
While visual consistency and intuitive navigation are crucial for creating a smooth user experience, it's important to find opportunities to make bold and unconventional design decisions.
Injecting creativity and uniqueness into your website can be a powerful way to differentiate yourself from the competition and establish a distinctive brand identity.
Explore these ideas to leave a lasting impression:
Try asymmetrical designs: Experiment with non-traditional and asymmetrical layouts to add visual interest and make your website appear dynamic and appealing.
Implement microinteractions: Subtle interactive elements throughout your website—such as hover effects, animated buttons, or playful loading animations—can make the user experience a bit more enjoyable without being distracting.
Create your own graphics: Use custom illustrations that reflect the personality and story of your brand. These illustrations can be hand-drawn or digitally created, with a distinctive style that sets your website apart from others.
Conclusion
With this article, we aimed to provide you with useful web design tips, highlighting important elements related to both visual aspects and accessibility, as well as user experience and the impact your page has on your visitors' memory.
If you need help with your website, whether it's outdated or not adapting well to mobile browsers, we can assist you. Get in touch with us so that we can work together to resolve it.
By Danae Salinas
Organic Growth Expert & Marketing Blogger
