Inbound Marketing & Technology Blog

Essential Design Fundamentals in Web Development

Written by Puja Damani | April 28, 2022

In website development, fundamental design principles simplify building an aesthetically pleasing and structured user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) websites. Designing a good website is demanding and requires effort and skills. Website design doesn't necessarily mean how it looks and feels but how it works. Even a simple-looking website with exceptional usability and a well-structured site typically performs amazingly well on google. User perspectives of such websites are also higher than those with low user experience.

The success of any website entirely relies on how the web design is. The designers have to take care of the utmost framework principle while developing it. A nicely designed website that comprises usability and wireframe elements determines the potential and the visual design impact. Because your website is your business profile and most likely, clients will visit your website, it becomes inevitable to get your website designed professionally. Lacking in any aspect could end up diminishing your brand impression and capabilities.

The users apprise the intelligent web design of the website. Many aspects influence the usability, form, subscription, landing pages (how good its glance), and function (how simple is it to handle). Design is by no means an architecture combined with technology to implement. However, many valuable principles and rules of thumb can assist make your projects exceptional in terms of usability and aesthetics. Websites that are not skilfully created tend to function inadequately and have sub-optimal Google Analytics metrics (e.g., low time on site, high bounce rates, standard pages per visit, and low conversions).

So, put together what constructs good web design? Below we analyze the web design fundamental principles that will make your website aesthetically engaging, pleasing, easy to use, and effective. This article will demonstrate what design techniques and methods are and why you should experience them. We'll also review some of the top well-accepted prominent and practical guidelines to follow.

Objective

Good web design consistently equips to the needs of the user. Are your web visitors looking for services, products, information, entertainment, interaction, and the transaction with your business? Your website page needs to have a transparent intent and fulfill a specific need for your website users in the most effective way possible. Design priorities do vary. For say, few websites focus on service, and other websites focus on sales. Simplifying the key objectives, purpose, or preferences helps determine the site's content and structure. But what brings visitors back come again and again? What are the key parameters? Let's continue to discuss.

Web Interface Design

Visitors on the internet tend to want information swiftly, so it is vital to communicate distinctly and make your data simple, easy to read, and grasp. To design an appropriate interface, you must know your target audience and keep that in mind throughout the design process. This will aid you in making relevant design decisions. Some powerful and effective techniques in your web design include arranging information using headlines and sub-headlines, unique icons, appealing presentation, title, subtitle, and bullet points instead of long windy sentences. The ultimate purpose of the visitors is to get information, and if your website can communicate with your visitors efficiently, most probably, they will spend more time on your website. 

Typography

Typography translates and marks up the creative design of text on your website pages, visually how the text looks to visitors and how the text and font are displayed over the website pages. Upright, easily readable typography constructs the way of reading effortlessly, while built with low typography turns users off. Optimizing your typography also helps in optimizing your user interface. Every website transfers and conveys the business's purpose and desire to its users. In a digital world, the simple procedure to proficiency is through typography.

Typography presents how the content on a web page is read and understood by users. For this logic, understanding its significance and applying the best design methods are some of the easiest ways to stand out in your niche and build a better online experience for your customers. These fonts and text elements are essential since they provide a pleasant reading experience for users. 

Regardless of how good your design is, text still governs the website as it delivers users the requisite information. Search engine crawlers are precise with this data, and it becomes a built-in part of SEO activities. The typography should be visually appealing and readable for visitors, including using keywords, meta-data, and other SEO-sensitive elements during the design and development process. The correct choice of color, font, and text size attracts your niche of the target audience in this digital landscape, and the outcome results to deliver the following results.

  • Helps in Enhancing readability
  • Builds and creates recognition
  • Grabs the reader's spotlight
  • Helps maintain consistency

Colors

An attentive, considerable well-thought-out color coordination can go a long way to enhance the user experience. Compatible colors create balance and consistency, and using contrasting colors for the text and background will make reading easier for the eye. White space effectively gives your website a modern and uncluttered glance. A perfect color combination entices users, while a poor combination can lead to diversion. So, choose the right color palette for your website, which can bring a pleasant ambiance and leave a good impact on visitors. Enhance user's experience by selecting the right set of color palettes to give a balanced look to your website design. Few colors may suit a specific text, and some might not, so maintaining consistency is the key role here.

Images

Images, infographics, other visual elements, and logos benefit users in identifying brand integrity and trust. No doubt, content is essential to understand and explain your products or services, but images help you make the best first impression. Website images can help in gaining page indexing on search engines. The captions with which you label your images are more content for SEO purposes. Images assist you in appearing in search engine results. Applying label images with search-friendly metadata and captions builds high content for search engines to index. If it is a genuine description of the image, with some added keywords incorporated, the content will show up for web and image searches, giving you more opportunities to be found. The outcome results website with images getting more visibility.

An image illustration can speak multifold words, and choosing the right images for your website can help with brand positioning and connecting with your target audience. If you don't have high-quality professional pictures with you, consider buying stock photos to uplift the look and feel of your website. 

Ease of Navigation

Navigation is the design interface for visitors to act and move around your website. Some techniques for efficient navigation comprise a logical page hierarchy, using breadcrumbs, designing clickable buttons, and following the click rule, which means users will be able to find the information they are looking for in less than clicks.

Navigation is one of the highest prime features or principles you must keep in mind and implement while designing a website. It's true because if your site is hard to navigate and nothing is readily available in the first place, then things might not go smoothly. Easy navigation includes an adaptable menu layout and the ability to move through sites quickly and reliably.

Design Layouts

Grid-based layouts organize content into boxes, columns, and sections, leading to a better-looking website design. When designing a website, there are certain things to consider when creating a good design. The most important thing is that it is easy for visitors to find your business on the web. The template is a reusable asset that describes a set of layouts for an application in website designing. This is a set of standards and a way of separating data from its presentation. These web design templates can be used for individual sections or entire pages. A well-built design ensures consistency of layouts and allows patterns to be easy to reuse anywhere.

User Interface

A user interface is a medium through which the user connects and interacts with the website pages. It serves as a platform between the application and the user. If the User Interface is good, the visitor would like to spend more time on it. The designer's job is to make the UI look fresh, appealing, and straightforward. Some key areas to design a good UI are- consistency in fonts and color, keeping the interface easy and simple, using the page layout efficiently and aptly, removing irrelevant data associated with information, and keeping away infinite scrolling of data, if any.

Performance - Page Load Time

In this fast-moving digital space, everybody dislikes a website that takes a delay to load. To make page load times more quickly, optimize the images, clean up the media library, combine code into a central CSS, reduces HTTP requests, and minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript (compressed to speed up their load time) for enhanced loading speed. High-performance websites result in high return visits, low bounce rates, higher conversions, consistent engagement, higher ranks in organic search, and better user experience (UX). There are some methods to streamline the page speed are as follows:

  • Scale down the image sizes
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Reduce the number of plugins
  • Move your website to the best host
  • Reduce the use of web fonts
  • Optimize the Database in CMS and Minimize redirects
  • Keep down the number of JS and CSS files

Responsive Design

A core part of web development is implementing a responsive design that fits well with all smartphones, computers, laptops, or display devices irrespective of their screen proportion, defined as the height and width of a display gadget. Most users want a mobile version of the website in today's time. It is the designer's job not only to design the website for a bigger screen but also to focus on the smaller screens, too, and the development team should incorporate these basics while building the web pages. The design should suit most smartphones offered in the market. Some methods for responsive design are:

  • Image optimization
  • Assure CTA buttons can be easily clicked on compact screens
  • Design distinct prototypes
  • Reckon a Mobile-first design technique
  • Apply latest layout technologies, use responsive images, responsive typography, etc

Demonstrate Mobile-Friendly Designs

Now it's commonplace to access websites from multifold devices with numerous screen sizes, so it is a principle essential to consider your website mobile-friendly. If the website is not mobile-friendly, you can either rebuild it in a responsive layout or build an exclusive mobile site (a different website explicitly optimized for mobile users).

Create a professional and functional website by keeping the design elements in mind. Fundamentals of productive, effective web design can assist your website to be more active, beneficial, engaging, and important for visitors. In today's digital age, keeping users in mind the unstoppable-growing usage of tablets, phablets, and smartphones, web design must be effective for various screens. 

Consistency

Consistency in website design is a core part and gives attention to matching design elements throughout website pages. Design consistency is the critical factor in keeping all of the repeating components and aspects of the website similar throughout the site pages. The site page's brand consistency, color palettes, quality images (vector, SVG), font sizes, headings, sub-headings, titles, unique content, and button styles must be the same throughout the website. Organize everything in advance, finalize the fonts and the right colors for your texts, call to action buttons, forms, subscribe fields, etc., and stick to them throughout the development. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) intend to come in useful to retain the complete information about design elements and styles.

Wrapping Up

The above are the standard fundamental design principles for good website design. With the help of these principles, you can easily develop user-friendly business, professional, customer-centric functional websites. Beyond these fundamental processes, it would undoubtedly not be easy to build and create a sound and intuitive website. Precisely keep in mind a website with pleasant, competent, reliable, and usability will always succeed in the real world. The more you adapt, execute, and practice them, you will apply design principles almost intuitively. The more you design with usability principles, the easier it will become for you to generate effective solutions quickly.