Your webpage is the gateway to your product or service. You should think of your webpage and your entire online presence as the place where customers get their first impression of who you are and what you are about. Given this, you need to have a superior web design. Web design is as important as any other feature of your business, and in some ways, it may be the most important feature of your business.
It is possible to do your own web design. There are endless templates and online sites that will make it possible for you to do your own web design. That said, doing your own web design is an enormous challenge. Templates and pre-formatted designs will only get you so far. And when you take a look at your competition, you will quickly see that web design is a serious priority for doing business.
There are a number of factors to consider when working through web design. While you obviously need web design that grabs the attention of customers, you also need a web design that they can use. Frictionless web design with aesthetic appeal is what you are after.
What is web design? What are ways you can get ideas for web design? And what are the most important features of web design? This guide will get you started on the ins and outs of web design.
What is Web Design?
Web design is the entire process of designing the sites you see on the internet. It generally refers to the user experience side of website development rather than software development. Web design used to be primarily about designing websites meant to appear on desktop browsers. Web design must now take into consideration mobile devices when designing websites.
Our design involves working on the appearance, layout, and occasionally the content of websites. Appearance involves things like colors, font, images, etc. Layout has to do with the ways information is accessed and used. Good web design maximizes aesthetic appearance and easy usability.
Some web design focuses on simplicity so that there are no roadblocks to users or customers when it comes to accessing a website and the content on the website. The best web designers strive to remove any points of friction or resistance on a website to avoid frustration on the part of users.
The two most common methods of web design that can work for both desktop and mobile are responsive and adaptive design. Responsive design makes it possible for content to move dynamically depending on screen size. Adaptive web design has layout sizes that are fixed but align with common screen sizes. In both cases, the goal is to preserve the layout and render it as consistent as possible for ease of use. Both responsive and adaptive web design have their specific challenges, and making sure layouts remain consistent is the main challenge for web designers.
Where can I find Web Design Inspiration?
Since web design is a cornerstone of online marketing and commerce, there are many places to go to find inspiration and ideas. Many designers share their work and ideas online. A few places to look around include:
Best Website Gallery:
BWG provides a vast online gallery of designs. It is a collection curated by one man, David Hellman to showcase the finest work in the business. BWG uses a tagging system so you can quickly find sites based on their style, design approach, functionality, and more. And with over 2,000 quality websites to peruse, this comes in handy.
BWG offers you an enormous, high-quality gallery. It has a search option and tagging system. Things to look for on BWG include:
Portfolio website:
You can scroll through the portfolios of some of the most successful designers in the business.
Agency website:
Agencies can attract the highest quality designers, and their websites often received the highest rankings. These sites can inspire your own website as well as websites for clients.
Color inspiration:
You can filter web designs by color on BWG. This allows you to survey the color palettes that are attracting attention.
Behance:
Behance provides a web discover page that makes it easy to search and scroll an extremely diverse collection of web designs and ideas. You can set your search settings to specific ideas like timeframes, popularity, and location. For instance, you can search something like “the most popular web designs in South Florida” to narrow your inspiration ideas.
Behance is part of the Adobe family of companies. This is perhaps one of the largest collections of creatives online. It provides extremely detailed filtering capabilities that make it possible to search highly specific topics. This can be extremely helpful for businesses in small niche industries or businesses working within a small geographical area.
Behance is community curated. It offers things like “the most appreciated” designs in a specific industry or region. Behance even offers the option of searching web designs based on the tools used to produce the designs.
Awwwards:
Awwwards is highly respected in the web design industry. They attract submissions from the best designers around. This means designers who are constantly pushing the limits and breaking new ground in web design. Awwwards prizes are given by a jury of experts in the field, and it has become a prestigious honor among web designers.
Expert jury voting is broken down into categories. They do not base their vote on how pretty the site may be. The expert jury examines usability, creativity, and content. Each category is scored and the total provides the basis for their awards. You can look at each individual score when searching the Awwwards website to see how a particular design measured up. They also offer an extensive tagging system so you can look at things like platforms used, dominant colors, and industry details.
Important Factors on a Web Design
There are a few basic features of good web design. Make sure your web design adheres to these basic ideas.
Usability
Great usability is immediately recognized by users. Bad usability is just as apparent. It is essential that people are able to navigate and access the web design without resistance and frustration. Users should know exactly where they are on the website at all times and be able to navigate to any other part of the website with ease. You do not want users to have to return to the main page simply to jump to another part of the page. This will shut them down and send them away from your web page.
Speed
These days, you have literally seconds to pull users into your website. If your website is slow or cumbersome, users will simply leave and find something else. While you need a web design that captures the imagination of users, you also need to make certain that your website can be navigated quickly and with ease.
Aesthetics
It is important that your website be visually impressive. The web is a visual medium, and users will choose a website based on how they look. Aesthetics are a crucial component of your web design. Make sure your aesthetic choices are consistent with your product or service and your potential users/ customers. Visual appeal not only contributes to brand awareness, but it can also increase your credibility.
Content
Content is paramount in web design. While all the other components are important, without content, you have nothing to offer. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the main factor that drives traffic to your website. Content should be relevant, and informative, and imagery and video need to be high-resolution. SEO, aesthetics, usability, and speed drive users to your website, content keeps them on your website and drives conversions.
Lead Generation
A critical component of your web design is lead generation. This is the way your design directs traffic to your site from search engines and other types of online activity. SEO is the obvious starting point for lead generation, but ways of forming things like backlinks are also important. Your web design needs to be accessible to other web activities in order to generate leads and business,
Mobile-Friendly
Almost 80 percent of online commerce is now done on mobile devices. If your web design is not accessible to mobile devices, you are sunk. You must optimize your web design for mobile users.
Web Design Do and Don’t
Much of web design comes down to some practical guidelines of what to do and what not to do. The dos and don’ts of web design are:
Keep your interface consistent:
Make sure the overall look and feel of your website remain consistent across all the stages and pages of your site. Things like navigation, color, typefaces, and writing styles should remain consistent to sustain usability.
Make navigation easy to use.Make sure all pages are clearly and simply labeled. Make it easy for users to navigate across any and all pages. Users lose interest very quickly when navigating a website becomes cumbersome.
Make it easy for users to scan your pages:
Users need to be able to take in what a page is telling them quickly and easily. Customers are not on your website to read. They are there to find what they are looking for. Easily scannable web pages are what you are after.
Take your content seriously:
No matter the flash or beauty of your web design, if you do not have good content, no one will take you seriously. More than 90 percent of the information on the web is in written format. Make certain your content is polished and well-written.
Check for errors:
Proofread and check multiple times for errors on your website. Spelling errors, incorrect information, and anything that does not properly correlate to images will kill your online image and destroy your credibility.
Web design don’ts:
Do not make users wait to load content. Most online users expect a page to load within seconds, and they will move out of your page the instant it does not meet their expectations. If your web design is too cumbersome and loads content slowly, you will lose users and customers.
Don’t open internal links in new tabs. Users expect everything to remain within the same tab. They do not want multiple open tabs on their browsers. If you need to provide a link that opens a new tab, it should be clearly marked as such.
Don’t use multiple typefaces. It can be tempting to use different typefaces for different kinds of content on your webpage. Don’t do this. It becomes confusing to users, and it can be simply annoying. You need everything to be smooth and uniform.
Don’t use too many colors. Some web designers get carried away with the use of color. While this can be creative, it is distracting to users. This is similar to multiple typefaces in that it becomes distracting and annoying for people who are just trying to get what they need or want from your web page.
Difference between Web Design and Web Development
Web designers make sure a website is usable, attractive, and provides necessary information. Web design is often called UX design. Web development is the programming and coding that runs websites. This is effectively the grammar of a web page.
Custom Web Design Vs. Using Templates
Custom web design is ideal. This makes it possible for you to develop a web design that is specific to your needs and your business. Custom web design also tends to stand out over other web pages. Custom web design, however, is more expensive. And unless you have your own web design staff, it can be difficult to do on your own.
Using templates will work for your web design. If your needs are relatively simple, there are countless places online to obtain web design templates, and many of these templates are quite creative and unique.
Do it Yourself or Hire an Agency
Given the complexity and difficulty of web design, it may make sense for you to hire an agency. The fact is, the initial investment in unique, quality, custom web design can pay off quickly. There are nearly infinite web pages online. A quick search of your business type will turn up thousands of web pages. In order to stand out among this massive global competition, you need to have a professional web design.
That said, it is possible to do web design yourself. With a combination of templates and some creativity, it is possible to create your own web design.
Why partner with Hey Day Marketing for website design services?
To succeed in today’s market, you absolutely must create a professional and unique online presence. To do this, you need creative, professional, and singular web design. HeyDay Marketing can provide you with a web design that is specific to your business and your values.
HeyDay Marketing has the professional staff of creatives who can design a web page that makes your business stand out. Grabbing attention online is essential for success in business today. To do this, you must create an online presence that grabs the attention of users and potential customers. This is what Hey Day Marketing is all about. We can offer web design that is well above the kinds of things you find in online templates.
HeyDay Marketing provides a full range of consulting and digital marketing. From SEO to web design, Hey Day Marketing can make your business stand out. To gain the attention you need to succeed, it is best to go with professional web designers, and this is exactly what Hey Day Marketing can provide.
