Look and the feel of your website is extremely important, Most of your website visitors will straightaway bounce off from the website if your website is dull in look. May be they have come to your website to complete some action or to find some useful pieces of information. And that is one of the reasons you should help your visitors by providing them an exceptional look.
1 ) Creativity
As a web designer/developer you need to avoid adding unnecessary design elements.
Those are the elements which do not provide a website any functional purpose. These
unwanted elements will always block the users mission of finding what they need from
your website or they will make it harder for the visitors to get what they try to get.
Therefore, from the users perspective, it is always simplicity is the best. Researchers
have shown that simple yet still eye catching and well functional website will have
more conversion rate than a complex design. Therefore, our suggestion is to increase
the simplicity of your design while maintaining the quality of the website with rich functions.
- Colors - You will need to select the colour theme according to the concept of the design. But make sure not to overuse number of colours. Our advice for you is to use Adobe Colour wheel or something similar to that in the process of selecting colour themes.
- Typography - It is really important to choose correct header sizes and the font types. The fonts that you use in a website should also match with the concept of the website. Therefore, you have to select fonts carefully as they have the ability to jeopardize the authentic concept of the website. Header sizes should also be very clear and distinguish to the end users.
- Graphics - This is where you should be careful to the most. If your graphics are going to be wrong then you will definitely have negative effects on your website.
2 ) Visual Hierarchy
If you visual hierarchical order is correct then the most important elements should be at the
very top of the website. Once the web page is loaded, then your visitors will naturally gravitate
to the vitally important element first.
You should keep in your mind that the real goal of optimizing a website for usability
means encouraging the users to complete a desired action. This could be anything.
Sometimes it might be filling a form or contacting you for your service or buying what they need from the website.
Adjusting colours or sizes of elements will help you to force your users focus on those
most wanted elements first. As most users read from left to right, it is always good
keep most wanted pieces of information on the left of the web pages. Use dark colours
on such elements to get more attention to them.
3) Navigability
As a web developer, you must be able to create the good linking structure. You must ensure that the customers will find what they need and navigate easily within the website. You must provide your visitors a strong links which would guide them properly. Generally speaking, your visitors should not spend too much time on thinking what link they should click next. Moving from point X to point Y should be really hassle free.
- Your structure of primary navigation should be simple
- Footer links will increase the navigability
- Breadcrumbs should also be used on every single internal page
- Including a search box will help your visitors to find what they are looking for
- Too many navigation options will bring negative effects
- Your navigation links should not be more than three levels deep
4) Consistency
Consistency should also be maintained in order to have better results. The overall look of the
website must be really consistent throughout the website. Backgrounds, colour schemes, fonts,
graphics and images must be really maintain the integrity of the website.
It is more nice if you can create different layouts for different pages. This will give your website
users a new experience and it will also give you the ability to keep your website users without
bouncing them off from the website.
5) Accessibility
Accessibility to your website via the mobile phones and other smart devices is really essential
these days. The number of people browsing Internet through the mobile devices are increasing at
an alarming speed. Therefore, your website should be able to facilitate the requirement of different screen sizes.
Which means in other words, your website should be responsive to mobile devices. Responsive websites
will adjust their content according to the different screen sizes.
Your website should be cross browser compatible. Most common browsers must be able to render your
website without any hindrance. You should check your website against many browsers and verify that
it renders nicely prior to making it alive.
Alt tags for images plays a huge role. They help search engines to identify images. Therefore it is a good
practice to use Alt tags for images. If a browser is unable to render an image in a website, alt tags will
still tell the user what the image is about.
6) Conventionality
Over the past years, websites have develop their own standards. Some of the things have become very close to standard rules of web designing. Some of those rules are,
- Having the main navigation at the top or left side of the pages
- Having the logo on the top left or centre
- Logo should be clickable and it will navigate the users to the home page
- All links should be able identify them as links once the user hover over them
- Use shopping cart icon or shopping bag icons on the ecommerce websites
