Top 6 Basic Elements of Web Design
Creating a great design for your website can seem like a tedious and complex process. While choosing a theme for the website something always seems to be missing from the mix. Designing a website is a complicated process of creation, combination and transformation. There are certain elements of the web design that you need to manage for getting best results.
Whatever you do there always seems to be something missing from the result making it not quite as satisfying as you envisioned it to be. But it is most definitely worth getting exactly right. And besides visuals and themes, there’s SEO and other rankings for you to care for.
So let’s dive right in and cover the base elements of website design that, when used correctly, can turn your website into gold. Let’s take a more comprehensive look at using your web design to improve and enhance your user’s experience on your website.
Take Care of the Tech Stuff First
The best website design in the world will do you no good if your visitors can’t see your website or don’t stick around long enough for you to convert them. Internet users expect websites to load pretty fast, around 30% of internet users only wait for two seconds for a website to load.
Sign up with a reliable hosting provider so that you don’t have to worry about losing customers just because your site was too slow or, worse, didn’t load at all. Roughly three-quarters of visitors abandon a website because it took too long to load.
Check out websites like HostingAdvice.com for advice on selecting the best host for your website.
The 6 Key Components of Web Design
The beauty of web design is that it’s an art form and not a science. Good designs are able to stand out from the crowd, attract visitors and retain them. Here are the elements of web design that are important. Let’s have a look at them
1. Overall Layout and Visual Appearance
First impressions are critical, which means that you have to amaze or at-least interest your visitors as soon as your website loads. Your design should please the eye of the visitor, and for it to achieve that it should be intuitive, simple, familiar, accessible and clean.
Use plenty of whitespace, paddings and margins to distinguish the element of your website and differentiate them from each other. Use grid based designs to keep items organized and orderly.
Strong graphics and designs provide act as supplements to your text, but make sure that they are aligned with the brand image you want to represent. Try to direct your visitor’s eyes and behavior with your designs.
Emphasize the to horizontal area of your website and use it to place the brand’s logo, website navigation tabs and a search box if required.
2. Color Scheme
One of the other elements of web design is color scheme. For choosing a color scheme, pay attention to your brand perspectives and the target audience demographics. This will make the process easy for you.
A professional website, for example, can use deep hues while an artistic website may rely on bright colors. Pay attention to the expectations of your readers expectations. Young children mostly like primary colors, teens and young adults like bold one while older audiences like more mature and refined colors.
Choose a dominant color and then consider picking a color palette. If you want to attract special attention towards a specific segment, try picking a color that makes it stand out from your overall theme’s color palette.
3. Typography
Once again you have to use the demographics of your audience and industry to pick fonts and typography. Formal websites should mostly stick with distinguished serif fonts, while artistic and light websites can use very light and airy fonts to attract attention to their website.
You want to balance normalcy with a bit of freshness. Look for a font that is a little different. Your text should always be easily readable. Use a complementary font for accents or headings but don’t use more than three typefaces or overdo sizing adjustments. Lastly, make sure that you have a nice contrast between your text and your website’s background colors.
4. Navigation
First off, don’t use overly complicated hover-effects or multi-tiered sub-navigations. Navigational space is not something to be overly creative with. Use navigational elements for the purpose of effective navigation so that your visitors can get to their desired content without any hassle, and as quickly and easily as possible.
Strong navigation extends beyond main menu, and for long designs you may want to include arrows to help guide the user through navigation. Add a back to top button (if necessary).
Don’t ignore the footer menu. If a user has read through all your content and gotten to the bottom of your page, give them somewhere to go or something else to do. Such as sign up for a newsletter or updates.
5. Content
Once you’ve got the layout, you can start concentrating on your content. Now it’s time for you to pay attention to how your message blends in with your theme. Communication is critical when you’re interacting with humans and given the short attention spans of people and their lightning fast impressions, your content should be easy to read, understand and digest.
Use headings and text to organize your website’s sections. Let your readers know what information you are providing. Think short and sweet. Look closely at each word and see if you really need it or not.
Make sure to pay attention to the secondary pages such as ‘About’ and ‘Contact Us’. Try to use the proper tone and convey the right message.
6. Don’t Forget About Mobile
Now do it all again, but smaller. You can’t forget this element as this is one of the important elements of web design.
In late 2016, the amount of mobile traffic took over desktop traffic on the internet. Today it is only extending it’s lead further. This means, your website must be able to serve the visitors who visit it on a phone or tablet. Search engines are now starting to prefer mobile optimized sites more than their desktop counterparts and ranking them higher in search results.
Mobile sites are not just a feature or an extended version for your site anymore, they are a necessity now.
Most themes available nowadays come equipped with mobile centered elements to handle mobile traffic. But if you are designing your own custom look, you’ll surely need to choose between one of the two main options: A mobile only look that activates when a non-desktop device accesses your website or an adaptive and responsive look which adjusts to various screen sizes.
You need to pay full attention to the different elements of web design to get the best website for attracting customers.
