Whether your goal is to boost brand awareness or to sell your products and services, having an excellent web design can make a significant difference between getting more conversions or losing a prospect.
Your site helps people learn what your brand or business is all about. The last thing that you want to happen is to have a poorly designed site that will prevent your prospects into turning into paying customers.
In this post, we’ll talk about the six special characteristics of an excellent web design:
1. Excellent web design loads quickly
Here’s the thing, if your site is taking more than three seconds to load, then you could be losing out valuable prospects.
So how do you speed up your site? Well, one way to improve your site loading time is to optimize your site images. Bigger files take a while to load. Therefore, decreasing the size and scale of your images can help reduce the site’s loading time.
If you’ve already applied these, then the next thing that you need to do is to have a server upgrade. Another thing you can do, if your website is hosted on WordPress, is to install WordPress plugins that can speed up your website’s loading time.
It shouldn’t take your site a few seconds to load, no matter what kind of device it’s being accessed from. You must test your site regularly to ensure that it loads quickly, not just on your desktop, but on mobile phones and tablets as well.
2. Excellent web design is balanced
Designing your site is all about creating that perfect “balance.”
That way, you’re ensuring that your design isn’t going to tip from one side to another. It’s also like achieving a balance of weight between symmetry and asymmetry.
Asymmetric Balance
Achieving an asymmetrical balance is quite challenging because it takes time to fine-tune your design.
Sometimes, to be able to pull it off, you need to have a trained eye. If you’re not too careful, the design could quickly go off-balanced.
You need to know how to work with the visual weight, working with sizes, colors, and adding and removing elements.
Symmetric balance
Symmetrical balance, on the other hand, is defined by putting elements on either side of a vertical or horizontal central axis.
3. Excellent web design uses the “F-Pattern”
Several eye-tracking studies found out that people are scanning computer screens using an F-pattern. What a majority of people see is on the screen’s top left. Meanwhile, the right side of the screen is hardly noticed.
Instead of forcing the viewer’s visual flow, a site that’s effectively designed will closely work with an average user’s natural behavior, and then place the information on the site according to the order of importance. From left to right, then from top to bottom.
4. Excellent web design has a visual hierarchy
We all look at a site in a certain way that’s common for all viewers. This principle is called visual hierarchy.
Visual hierarchy is all about following a particular order in which your eyes focuses first, and then move to the details. It’s all about having the idea of where a visitor will look first, and then move on to other pages on a site.
You should place your information according to its importance for most users. Take note, that certain parts of your site such as the call to action, value propositions, and forms are more crucial than the others.
Then, place the most important information in a location wherein viewers can most likely see it. Because the average attention span of people are decreasing, you have to ensure that all the important details about your products, services, and so on can be seen by visitors.
You also need to know what your business objectives are. That will help you prioritize the information. Then design your web page’s visuals depending on the priority of that information.
5. Excellent web design practices the “Rule of Thirds”
When adding images in your design, it’s best to go with the rule of thirds. The picture should be divided into nine equal parts, by two horizontal and two vertical lines that are equally spaced.
Also, elements that are compositional should be placed along intersections or lines.
Remember that appealing, high-quality images contributes to excellent web design. If you make your images interesting, then it will be more appealing to your audience.
6. Excellent web design is innovative but not distracting
To be able to come up with stunning web design involves a lot of creativity. Being able to innovate with various design elements and whitespace makes a more appealing design that’s less distracting. Also, it guides visitors wherever they want to go.
Going for a clean, minimalist design that’s surrounded by a lot of whitespaces makes a website even more appealing to users. A lot of users also deem that a distracting web design entails low-quality products and services.
Over to You
So there you have it! Now, you’ll be better equipped with the information that you need to make a site design that’s conversion-driven, user-friendly, and highly effective.
About the Author: Kenneth Sytian is the CEO of Sytian Productions, one of the leading website designer Philippines company. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is considered one of the top influencers in web design and development.