Website Design Ideas and Tips
Here, you will find a list of website design ideas and tips that you can use to make your site a more user-friendly and effective experience for visitors. Website design should make it easy and fast for users to find what they're looking for, diminishing visitor effort and time. Scroll down to find ideas and tips you can use to improve your website's overall design today- helping it achieve the results it deserves!.
User-Friendly Website Design Ideas
When deciding on a website design technique, it's important to understand the demographics of your site's visitors, and design it accordingly.
- Web users don't read, they SCAN (or just glance at) a web page to find what they're looking for. There are large parts of the page they won’t even look at, and if a page doesn't appear interesting or useful to them, then they will leave the site and continue their search process.
- Your website's design must relate to your content. Content is more important than the design which supports it, so make sure your content is up to par before moving onto the following techniques! Also, don’t use a technique just because it exists, use it if it makes sense in your context.
In all, if a a website provides high-quality content and a user-friendly design, it will have a better chance of attracting and keeping visitors. Below, are some website design tips, based on the layout, color, and font usage of an effective website design:
Layout - Web Design Ideas & Tips
The layout of your website makes it easy for viewers to skim the content and find what they're looking for. Here are some simple layout techniques that can improve your website:
- The use of white space, the empty space in a design, is an important factor in any layout. By manipulating white space, you can create relationships between certain elements to make your site easier to scan, or you can use white space to make elements stand out (like the Google homepage uses white space to emphasize its search bar). Check out this article on how to use white space effectively in website design.
- Navigation is one of the most important aspects of a website because it helps your visitors move from one place to another. To prevent users from leaving your site, group your content and add highlighted elements (hyperlinks, anchors, etc) to guide them through the content of the page. People read in a "Z" pattern, so keep this in mind in your page layout.
- Use less than 10 links per page, and make sure each one is optimized for search engine optimization (SEO). Maintain your site's hyperlinks by making sure each one uses keywords to explain what it is linking to, test to see if the link is still active, and check to make sure internal links open in the same window and external links open in a new window.
Color - Web Design Ideas & Tips
In website design, color can help set the mood you'd like your site to portray. A website layout should give refreshing feel to the eyes, however, make sure not to highlight too many elements, because they may get lost in each other’s company.
- Warmer tones like orange, red, and yellow are naturally bright and powerful colors that tend to attract the eye. Use warm colors for "Buy Now" or "Click Here" buttons and other important elements to help them stand out and attract attention. Avoid using warm colors with greens and purples of the same intensity, because this is too strong on the eyes.
- Colder colors like blue, green, and purple offer harmony in a layout, because they calm down warmer colors and add more contrast to your layout. Blue is the most common color of hyperlinks, so it's smart to avoid using blue text unless it is an internal or external link.
- Using warm colors for foreground and cool colors for background enhances the perception of depth. For example, when you put a red button on top of a blue background, the button looks like it is jumping outwards. Vise versa, when a blue graphic is placed on an orange background, the graphic seems to be set more towards the back.
When you're through with color, view your page from 3 feet away. If the text is unreadable, then use a different color combination. Also, test your color combination using lower color depths on your monitor to make sure that contrast is still in occurrence.
Font - Web Design Ideas & Tips
Font is an important element in website design, because your content is why people are visiting your site. If your content is difficult to read, than many will turn away. Use the following font techniques to make your site more user-friendly:
- Make sure the spacing in your font is not too close, or it will be difficult to read.
- Do NOT underline normal text because it will confuse visitors (thinking it's a link). In other words, NEVER underline text that does not carry a link! If you want to emphasis font, do it with italics, bold, or the highlighting tool instead.
Hopefully, you’ve found a few new techniques that will be useful in your website design. As always, using them effectively comes down to
thoughtful implementation and whether it makes sense in your context or not.
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