The Principles of Good Website Design
Your website acts as the face of your business. It may well be the first, and only, chance you have to impress a potential customer. As such, it plays a critical role in determining the success of your brand.
With all that in mind, it’s clear that effective website design is vital. It’s easy to get distracted by the visual side of the design process, but the best websites marry an effective aesthetic with excellent usability. It’s a classic combination of form and function, and each is every bit as important as the other.
Good website design offers a simple way to maximise conversions. Experience has shown us that many users favour simple, effective websites; especially when they perform to a high standard. Excessively elaborate designs can produce resource-hungry websites that take forever to load and render inconsistently across different devices!
Simple, well-structured and fast-loading websites are far more popular with visitors. They’re also popular with search engines like Google, which often reward well-designed websites with a better ranking position in the search results.
What Determines Effective Website Design?
Website design is all about making a series of decisions and judgement calls; the right decisions lead to success; the wrong decisions undermine it. Every project is different, but we’ve identified a series of key principles that consistently underpin effective website design:
- Keep it simple
- Make the text easy to read
- Express the site’s key message clearly
- Apply a consistent, coherent style
- Give thought to the colour palette
- Use high-quality images
- Make navigation intuitive
- Ensure the website loads fast
- Deliver a consistent experience across all devices (AKA mobile-friendly design)
- Always think about the user’s needs first!
These 10 principles of good website design guide us through each step of the process and ensure a successful end result.
