Website Designing: 11 Principles To Create Appealing Websites
What is the purpose of a website? To convey the business message and to let the prospects make a deal online. Another important role of a website is to keep the existing customers updated with any new happening about the business. A perfect website should impress not just the end users, but also the search engines. To achieve all the objectives from a website, a web design should be SEO-friendly, have excellent aesthetics, smooth navigation, and flawless layout.
What principles should be followed to create appealing designs? The lines below will shed light over the topic.
Consider The Different Screen Sizes
It’s not the time to create websites just for the desktops or laptops. Smartphones are in great use to access internet, so web designers have to consider different mobile screen sizes while creating websites. A website not catering to the needs of 1 out of the 4 visitors using mobile devices, means falling prey to failure. There are two ways to enrich the user experience: create a different version for mobile users or make a site easy to resize as per device used by the user.
Simplicity Rules
A website visitor usually looks for the possible solution a website provides and an ease to reach the desired destination. Provide help to the visitors what they have to do, instead of making them confused and think about switching. Leave more white space instead of stuffing more images and content at each and every corner of the web pages.
Consistency Means Convenience
If there are used different colours, different templates, different fonts at different pages of a website, it will reveal that the designer hasn’t maintained the consistency throughout the web design. Consistency is the key to keep the visitors engaged and decide something positive. Choose a good style and follow that at each of the web pages.
Multi-Browser Compatibility
A website shouldn’t be compatible with a single browser, but for multiple browsers. Viewers shouldn’t have any problems viewing a website from whatever browser they are using like IE, Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Safari. Although, standard compliance of different browsers is increasing with time, but still it’s important to consider the aspect of cross-browser compatibility.
Guide Where Needed
If a site visitor feels like lost at a web page, more are the chances he/she will close the site and will go for another option. Write clear call to actions and place them accordingly. Do look at your website critically.
Semantic Code For Easy Indexing
Search engine crawlers find it easy to index a site that has semantic code. Titles, H1s, H2s, and everything at the website should be properly labelled to help the SEO efforts. Semantic code also assists in easy editing and displaying the web pages quickly. Flash is not the recommended technology to be used at websites to avoid the crawling issues.
Google Analytics: Offers Great Help
With Google Analytics, you can collect piles of information to keep your website working smoothly. Without paying a single penny, you can get the details of browser evaluation, screen resolution, buyer behaviour, and connection speed. The information ultimately helps in improving the design of a website.
Regular Updating: It’s Needed
Regular updating of the website content not just makes the site fresh for the visitors, but also helps in getting to the top ranks. Keep the visitors coming again and again by publishing fresh content frequently.
Check Errors
A website should be checked for any kind of spell or grammar mistakes. Make use of Google Webmaster Tools to detect any errors and ensure your website is running amoothly for longer.
Legal Aspects: To Be Considered
Do include relevant copyright, privacy, or any other legal documents/disclaimers where needed. The duplication issue is at peak over World Wide Web, so do consider this aspect. Also check whether you are operating legally in any of the local market or internationally.
Testing: Never Ignore
Most of the website owners forget to test their website once it’s live. To create the first positive impression of your business over the site visitors, do try different call-to-action statements, different offers, and anything that could raise the interest level of the prospects.
A web design that isn’t as per expectations of the customers or that don’t appeal to the search engines, fail to claim the right ROI. It’s the design of a website that makes a business distinguished among many other rivals. Think about the principles or alarming signs given above and make your design not just looking stunning, but working efficiently.
Author Bio:
This post is written by Emma Jones, a professional writer, working with a well-known web design company in Glasgow. Emma is a very well known name in web designing and graphic designing field. She loves reading tech blogs and share own views regularly.
