8 Web Design Principles That Make an Excellent Website

Your web design can generate more hot leads or drive away potential customers. The best way to design a top-performing website is to keep it simple. After all, balancing aesthetics and functionality is one of the essential web design principles. When designers merely focus on design for aesthetic’s sake, web pages may be attractive but not user-friendly.

In this article, we gathered eight web design principles to help you combine design, content, and functionality into a lead-generating website. Read on to learn more.

1. Identify Your Purpose

A successful web design begins with a clear purpose. Identifying your end goal can help you make the right choices to boost your chances of converting visitors into paying customers. 

For instance, if you want to create an e-commerce website, your website’s primary purpose is to sell products; your web design should highlight your products. 

You must also ensure that the buying and checking out functionalities must be simple. 

2. Keep a Simple Web Navigation

Visitors ideally want to navigate a website easily. We suggest that you ensure everything a visitor would look for is within three clicks of your homepage. 

You can also test the website navigation’s user-friendliness by instructing customers how to find something on the site. Rethink your navigation if the instructions have several steps or are hard to follow. 

3. Suitable Web Design for All Screens

An excellent web design ensures everyone can easily access your website, regardless if visitors use a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop. Successful e-commerce websites optimize their pages for mobile because several users use phones for online shopping, which is a significant e-commerce trend.

4. Use High-Quality Pictures

If pictures paint a thousand words, your images’ quality and tone must match your web design. Be careful when using stock photography because it can look cheesy and unprofessional. Hiring a professional photographer can take authentic-looking photos of your team, products, or locations. 

5. Whitespace Is Your Friend

Whitespace is the blank space around design elements and blocks of text. However, the area doesn’t always have to be white; it could be the background color of your page. 

A typical web design mistake is cramming every website pixel with images or text, but a blank space reduces noise, makes content more digestible, and helps pictures stand out. 

6. Use Simple, Clean Fonts and Colors 

Colors and fonts are essential elements of web design. They should match your brand’s overall appearance. Simplicity is crucial when choosing typography and color palette. 

Try to stick to three or fewer fonts: one for headings, body text, and a third for accents.

Modern web designs use one color. However, select one dominant color and two to four accent colors if you’d like multiple colors. 

Too many color combinations and fonts make a website look chaotic and unprofessional.

7. Create a Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy guides visitors through your website’s content and graphic elements. Larger font sizes and pictures can gravitate readers to the essential information. 

You can use different colors, backgrounds, images, and type sizes to create visual interest and hierarchy. Studies found most people process web pages in an F or Z layout. 

8. Publish Quality Content

Lastly, no website would be complete without compelling content. Your web design captures visitors’ attention, and the content will keep them on the site long enough to purchase or fill out a form. 

You must identify the page’s central message and implement a clear call to action. You must also incorporate the latest and best search engine optimization practices into your content and web design. Some of the same website tips for design are suitable for creating SEO-friendly content. 

Adding headings, small digestible paragraphs, relevant pictures, and bulleted lists can make your content more readable for humans and search engines. 

Designing a Successful Career

Following these eight web design principles can help you generate leads and convert visitors into paying customers. 

Digital Alchemy is a digital marketing agency in Charlotte, North Carolina, offering web design services to help you tell your story well. Contact us now to plan your project today!