Imagine walking into a store to look for new work clothes. Looking around, you notice stains on the floor, disorganized shelves, and a strange smell. Would you stay in the store and buy from this retailer?
Store design influences customer behavior – the same goes for websites.
Why is good web design important?
The average web designer earns $57,000 per year , about $8,000 more than junior web developers who earn an average of $44,000 per year. Designers are reasonably well paid for a good reason: their work is vital.
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5 principles of effective web design
When we talk about “web design principles”, we are referring to the general rules for designing the textural and visual elements of a website or web page. Every brand adopts web design principles differently – some follow best practices and some don’t.
To help you design a great website, here are 15 web design principles (along with examples of websites that use them effectively):
Pages should be easy to navigate
In Clutch’s User Experiences on Websites study, 94% of respondents rated site navigation as the “most important feature of the website.”
It’s no surprise why. If a search engine user comes to your website looking for “mobile design” information and cannot find it, the natural next step is to click “back” and try another website.
How to adopt a well-planned navigation? Take inspiration from The Cool Club website.
When you enter the homepage of Cool Club, the layout of the site is extremely clear. You can navigate to key product sections (like ‘card games’ and ‘bucket list’) using the buttons on the left, and you can navigate to the ‘about’ and ‘contact’ pages using the buttons on the right.
The Cool Club
The brand currently has an interactive card game that features 54 cool variations and corresponding pages. Just scroll down the page and click on the map you want to see in more detail.
Always take advantage of negative space
Negative space (or “white space”) is the region around topics on a page, whether they are images, videos, text, or buttons.
Many enthusiastic marketers rush to fill in all the negative space on a page, hoping that giving visitors more information will make them more engaged.
Pages should be cohesive, yet engaging
When you read brand names like ‘Cadbury’, ‘Hershey’s’ or ‘Nike’, the vision of their logos, fonts and design styles probably spring to mind immediately. That’s the power of consistent branding.
Adopt complementary colors
Complementary colors are color pairs that you can mix and match without making your design look overwhelming and ugly.
The way colors display on a screen follows the Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) color model rather than the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) model used in printing. Painters also often use the Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) color model which considers the complementary colors to be red-green, blue-orange, and yellow-violet.
Whichever pattern you prefer, using complementary colors achieves a similar purpose as black and white. Complementary colors provide emphasis and create a clear visual identity for your brand.
You can see this on the Swab The World website.
These colors change to other complementary color combinations as you visit different sections of the website (although all colors have similar saturation so branding remains consistent).
If you look at The Cool Kids, Garroa and Swab The World websites, you might notice that each website has a unique ‘feel’. This feel comes from tailoring the design of the website to its audience.
Personalization is the ultimate goal here. Most of us like to buy products and services from brands that we feel connected to and represented by. In fact, research shows that 72% of consumers enjoy buying from companies that “align with their beliefs and values.” So if someone visits your website and sees their values, goals, and priorities reflected there, they are more likely to buy from you.
