Web Design Essentials: 10 Pillars of Effective Website Creation
The design of your website significantly impacts the user experience. Even an aesthetically pleasing design might not impress a user who simply wants to find what they’re looking for if your website makes it difficult to navigate and find the solution.
This article will explore the 10 pillars of effective website creation, helping you craft a website that not only looks good but also guides users efficiently towards their goals.
More Simple, More Leading
The goal of your website is to guide visitors into the lead funnel by providing them with what they are looking for. Therefore, focusing on this goal during website design is crucial. Websites with unnecessary design features can increase loading times and frustrate users. To prevent visitors from leaving, ensure your website design is simple and does not have distractions.
Clear and Concise Content
You must focus on providing high-quality, informative content that is easy to read and understand. Avoid using complicated jargon. Instead, communicate clearly with your audience.
Use Visuals
Humans process visuals faster than text. Additionally, expressing complex or innovative ideas can sometimes be simplified and made more impactful through the use of visuals like images, videos, and infographics in conjunction with text.
Develop a Smooth Structure for Better Navigation
Build an intuitive navigation where the design and structure of a website allow users to easily find what they are looking for and complete their tasks with minimal effort. Your goal should be to create a website design that seems like a well-marked path.
Responsive Design
Make sure your website looks well-adjusted on cell phones, tabs, laptops and desktop screens very well. It’s important to focus on responsive design because users nowadays use all kind of devices to access websites.
Here’s a breakdown of how people access websites from various devices:
- Smartphone: 91%
- Feature phone: 5.2%
- Tablet device: 27.3%
- Own laptop or desktop: 59.1%
Fast Loading Speed
The reason for this is that the website should serve fast to keep users and give a good impression. Slow loading speeds can anger and make users switch away from your site toward an increase in bounce rates and lost conversions. Research done by Google and Unbounce revealed that the bounce rates can get as high as 37% only in one second of the page load time. This reflects the value of even a small gap in engagement for end users, which will affect their experience. This 2023 HubSpot report concluded that almost half as many users leave a website which takes more than 3 seconds to load. Hence, the fact that you should concentrate on fast loading times to keep visitors.
Image Optimization
Perform image compression and resizing to lower their file size without quality compromise. This gives your site images the ability to load instantly without making a page load slowly.
Code Minimization
Keep the amount of code on your page to a minimum by discarding the irrelevant elements, spaces and comments. It decreases your web page overhead file size and eventually improves your load time.
Google and other organizations have produced results which show that up to 20% improvement in the page loading time can be achieved with code minimization. This means that fast internet is necessary to differentiate the user experience, or in a more practical way by those users with slower internet connection.
Proper Server Configuration
Make a decision on the web hosting provider you can trust, and set up your server settings in such a way as to achieve the best performance. This might mean applying caching mechanisms, content delivery networks (CDNs), and server-side caching, so as to improve page load speeds.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is important for SERPs in boosting the visibility of your site and driving organic traffic to your site. An online search conducted in 2023 by Moz determined that the top organic result in Google obtains an average CTR of 31.99% This implies that a high ranking in the search results is critical for the website visibility and significant traffic.
Conclusion
A good website company ensures your site is designed, taking care of all the parameters discussed in the article. If you think you are lacking at some point, take action now and save your online business.