3 Web Design Essentials For Total Newbies
Good web design is essential for any business, whether you operate mainly online or in the physical world. Good design helps your customer to navigate your site better and encourages conversions, as well as looking appealing to the eye. The right design will move customers around the website, keeping them on site for longer and will help them to encourage to convert by buying or booking your services. Getting to the essentials of design right can help you to create a well-functioning, attractive site.
1. Precedence
Good design helps to get across information about your business quickly and clearly. Precedence is how the user is led around the page by the design, in different parts of the design being given different visual weights. For example, most sites have a logo at the top, making it the first thing you see. Putting the logo on the top left of the page, and large, makes it the first place people look, helping people to know exactly which site they’re on.
After the logo, your design should direct the user’s eye around the site in a series of steps. You might want to lead their eye from the logo to a statement about the business, then onto the main text. You can do this with web design.
A web design company will use things like the position of where elements are on the page, colour, contrast, size, or design elements like arrows, to move the eye where you want it.
2. Spacing
It can be tempting to load a website with stuff, but actually this is poor design. Proper spacing is much more effective.
Line spacing between text can make it much more readable. It allows the eye to move easily from line to line, without causing the eye to wander between lines of text. The right line height is very effective.
Text shouldn’t touch other elements on the page. Padding creates space between elements like images and borders, and the text on a page. Again, this makes the text much more readable.
White space is an important part of web design. White space is empty space on a page, which is used to give balance, proportion and contrast to the page. More white space creates a more high-end feel, so good use of white space can be a very effective design element.
3. Navigation
A website that is easy to navigate is always going to work better than one with poor navigation. There’s nothing more annoying than a site that you can’t work out how to navigate around.
Start with common sense. Any buttons to help you move around the site should be easy to find, near the top of the page and easy to spot. Make sure they’re labelled clearly with where they will take you. Navigation should be easy to use, with any menus or sub-menus functioning properly.
Make sure it’s easy to tell where in the site you are and you can navigate back again, with good bread-crumb trails, site headings and a site map.
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