Top 10 Basic Principles of Powerful Website Design

In today’s world of internet and digital media, almost every business is having a website and a Facebook page. Website is your business’s introduction to the world and hence, it needs to be attractive, informative, and functional to create a positive impression of your business in people’s mind. Website has the power to make or break your business depending upon its quality. Therefore, businesses invest so much time and effort in making a good website these days.

The quality of a website is greatly determined by the quality of its design. Here we are discussing ten basic principles of powerful website design that you should follow to garner the full benefits from your business portal:

1. Purpose

It is important to think carefully about the needs of your target audience before beginning to design a web portal. It depends on your industry; your industry may be entertainment, education, healthcare, products, e-commerce, etc. Every page of your business website must be of value for your existing and prospective customers.

2. Information

With the falling attention spans online and an ocean of information available, people usually skim through the text or information present on a web page; no one has the patience to read a long body of monotonous text. Therefore, you should strive to provide the most relevant and concise information related to your business on your website. It is advisable to break the text into small paragraphs, bulleted points, headings and sub-headings, rather than using large chunks of text, which usually repel the visitors.

3. Font Selection

The kind of font that you select also has an influence on the overall look and feel of a web page. Generally, the Arial and Verdana fonts from the Sans Serif font family are considered good because they look contemporary without being obtrusive. The 16px font size is considered ideal for convenient online reading. Also, for the sake of keeping your design streamlined, it is advisable to restrict yourself to a maximum of 3 typefaces in a maximum of 3 point sizes.

4. Color Scheme

Colors have an important influence on people’s mind, and more so if we talk about the online color scheme of a website. There should be a clear contrast between the background and font color to facilitate easy reading. Complementary colors should be used to maintain balance and harmony across the web page. Also, vibrant colors, which evoke emotion, should be used sparingly in buttons and for call to action.

5. Image Selection

You might have heard the popular idiom, A picture is worth a thousand words. You should purchase some high-quality stock photos, if you don’t have such photos available at hand. Such photos add to the worth of your website. Also, you should make use of informative images such as infographics, as they engage the audience even better than the most well-written pieces of text.

6. Site Navigation

Navigation is a vital part of website design. It determines how easy or difficult it would be for a visitor to surf through the various pages of a web portal. A website must have user-friendly navigation so that it would be convenient for the user to surf the site. Some tactics to follow for effective web-portal navigation include clearly defined hierarchy, use of breadcrumbs, sitemap, and custom search options.

7. Grid Based Layouts

Grid based layout means a systematic and proper arrangement of information on a web page in the form of sections, columns, and boxes, rather than a haphazard appearance. Grid based layout lends an aesthetic quality to a web portal and looks welcoming to the visitors.

8. Consistency

It is important to maintain consistency in terms of the layout, design, and branding on the various pages of your website, to avoid creating any confusion and make the visitors comfortable.

9. Responsive Design

Responsive design or responsive web design is an approach to web page creation that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s environment based on factors such as operating system and screen size. That is to say, a responsive website works seamlessly on different operating systems, devices, and screen sizes. A responsive web design has assumed great importance in the present times, where a large number of people are using smartphones and tabs for surfing the internet.

10. Call to Action (CTA)

Call to Action or CTA is the end and aim of all the efforts that you do on your business website. This is what brings you business; so the site visitor must be promoted, persuaded and invited to click on the CTA button for generating business leads. You should give opportunity to the visitors to explore the site first, before leading them to CTA. Making the visitors fill personal information in the very beginning in those intrusive pop-up forms many a time bounces the visitors from the website.

If you are looking for a reliable website design company, then don’t forget to analyse their work based on the above principles before opting for their services.