Much like fashion, website design trends constantly change. Keeping up with these trends can mean the difference between providing meaningful experiences and losing out on potential sales. If you design your website using the following principles, you can leave a good impression on visitors and find many of them returning to your site repeatedly.
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Use Style Guides
Mainstays in the publishing world, style guides steer publications ranging from in-depth books and magazines to newspapers and promotional brochures. Their purpose is to provide uniform style and formatting across multiple documents or pages. You can implement style guides within your website to maintain content continuity, which enhances the user experience.
Additionally, style guides establish a content consistency that transcends staff and administrative changes to keep everyone on the same page when it comes to the brand of a company’s content. New staff members who start working on pre-established projects can easily pick up where you left off, since the website’s guidelines remain intact.
Any good style guide demonstrates a clear presence of structure. There are many strategies you can implement, such as dividing each page into three cells, tables, or columns. Make sure such elements are congruent in height and width. Focus on consistency with every page so that users become easily oriented to the site’s navigation process.
It’s paramount to determine font styles when devising a style guide. Fonts can either complicate or ease the task of reading a site’s text. Contrast also plays a role. The font you select needs to be viewable on different screen sizes, since many people today use mobile devices when searching and shopping online. Your font needs enough contrast to be easily read on any of the color backdrops your style guide invokes. Otherwise, it becomes indiscernible and disrupts the overall viewer experience.
Create More Space
An often undervalued aspect of website design is making use of white spaces. These are sections of your website that are blank or unused. Utilizing white space helps separate content and multimedia to achieve a clean, clutter-free look. This minimalist look may seem easy to achieve, but there are techniques you should know to effectively balance white space with other page elements.
Is minimalism right for your company? If your website is complex, filled with interactive multimedia and complex coding, this approach may not be a good fit. Conversely, if your website is not filled with a lot of interactive media or ads, minimalism can help you create the perfect visual effect.
You might consider minimizing elements on just one page, such as the landing page or homepage. Effective landing pages eschew navigation links or menus in order to minimize distractions. When users click on a hyperlink, they’ll see a clutter-free design and be directed toward one element or graphic.
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that a minimal design equates to a boring website. They fail to realize that large and vivid pictures can be captivating and just as insightful as an article or blog piece. This form of multimedia often gets your message or objective across much quicker than verbiage.
Simplify the Navigation
No matter how beautiful or responsive your website is, users won’t enjoy their experience if they have a hard time navigating from page to page. Start with getting rid of pages or content that don’t add value for your audience. You might even consider consolidating pages, for just like a lengthy food menu, too many choices can cause people to lose interest.
How you label your pages also affects user experience. Use short and predictable words so that the user knows exactly where to go the moment they see categories on the side or at the top. Finally, your navigation should be consistent. The design should not alter from page to page and errors should be virtually nonexistent.
No matter what products or services you offer, you need to allot a significant portion of your attention to your web design. After all, websites that are structured correctly and are visually striking tend to gather the most traffic.
Sources:
7 Tips for Choosing the Best Web Font for Your Design, designshack.net)
How to Use CTAs and Landing Pages To Boost Your Conversion Rate, business2community.com