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All Articles
Dec 11
Web Design
Eric Phung

Website Design Guideline: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do in Web Design

What is a good website design? What should you do to develop an effective website in design and function? 7 most important key elements to guarantee a good website design & 5 tips to improve your bounce rate. Need to know more about website design? Click to learn more!

Website Design Guideline: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do in Web Design

Website design or website development, which is more important? But before we get to that, let’s answer the most basic question, what is the intention of a website? 

No matter how graceful your website design is, if it doesn’t work well, it’s not a good website design. The same as website development. Users wouldn’t care if yours is best for SEO or how quick the load time is if your web page looks like you don’t care at all. In short, several factors fulfill the complete function of a website. As a business owner, you must acknowledge these elements to maximize the ability of your project.

Colors, reading pattern, typo, image, loading speed, and users friendly components, all together they made a brilliant website. And from these baselines, you can begin to optimize and make it easy to use, easy to reach, and work smoothly on all types of devices. At the end of the day, a good website design is what keeps your customers' journey working nicely without any bumps or confusion. In today’s article, we’ll show you all the most important elements of website design along with our guidance on how to keep your audiences engaged. 

1. User’s behavior on a website 

Just right before jumping into the website design principle, let’s study a little bit about user usage. We need to understand how they interact with website design, their patterns of behavior or preference. Therefore, we can tailor our design and UI/UX to fit these needs to soonly turn their clicks into a conversion. 

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They scan more than reading: 

Instead of reading your entire webpage, users tend to scan for anchor points to let them know what those texts are all about. Most of their hot spots are in the middle of the sentences, which means they’re looking for keywords only. Knowing this, you can customize your website by putting more anchor points, buttons, or guidance parts to keep them going. 

They love high-quality content: 

People are more willing to stay and look through your website if they find that you’re providing good & useful content. Good content will give you more traffic than just good designs, and it’s been proven for years. Make sure you’re creating original content, especially not copying from a random online source, or else it’ll downgrade your SEO quality and web page visibility. 

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They are incredibly impatient: 

Just look at your behavior when searching through websites, you’ll understand what this is all about. If your webpage loading speed is too long and taking forever, there are high chances your potential customers will leave and never look back. This also means that you can’t catch up with people’s expectations, and failed badly. And we’re sure that no business owner wants to see opportunities slip out of their hands, right? 

They hate confusion:

The clearer, simpler your website is, the more sales you could make. With a nice placement of a call to action or decision-making button, you’re sure to meet your goal. Give them clear instructions on where to read the info, where to purchase and they’ll love you right away. Don’t overwhelm with texts they do not need, it only pushes them further away. 

Let them control: 

Never, ever popping up windows that your users couldn’t expect it coming. It feels just like getting spam, and users wouldn’t love that. They want to have the power of control, whether with their windows browser or in their life. So provide them with an easy-control and understand webpage, you’re one step closer to success.

2. 7 most important elements for a good website design

Now, here is the real deal. Let’s have a look at all the most important components of a good website design.

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Simplicity is key 

We call this is the perfect balance between a great design with on-point user experience. A simple webpage will benefit you on so many levels and there are some ways to help you achieve that: 

Color palette:

Not only your web color must be relevant to your brand, it should express your personality and emotion. These tones can affect users' mood when they’re on your website as well, so choose carefully. We highly recommend not using more than 5 colors, and you should take your time choosing a palette that can be applied to the design and photography of your brand as well.

Typography:

Typeface is an important part of branding and website design. Each font could express a different voice and tone when looking at it. So when you’re choosing fonts for branding, keep in mind that you’ll also have to choose for your website. We often restricted the number of fonts to at most 3. But most of the time, 2 is enough. 

Visual:

Whether you’re selling physical products or services, visual plays an important role in your web design. One picture has the power to convince much more than millions of words. For a business website, it’s better for you to use real images, videos instead of stocks. From these forms of media, you can tell a lot about your brand personality and voice. The more consistent it is, the better impression you can create. 

Easy navigation 

When going through a website, you’ll always be looking for points that get you to some specific pages, it could be About – Sales or Contacts. Navigation is the key that unlocks what every user wants. It shows them how to find what they need, keeps them interactive and engaging. Without clear navigation, users will just give up and hop on to your rivals’ website. With navigation bars/buttons, you should keep them minimal, straight to the point, and consistent. 

Normally, on the navigation, we only keep the core info and links to help customers figure out what to do. This shall consist of Home – Products (this drop-down to more levels, depends on what you’re selling) – Payment & Shipping term – Sales – About us – Contact,… 

Reading pattern

You know that users don’t read straight from head to toes of a textbox, right? The most common way people would scan through your website is in an F-shape. The areas are in the top and left space are the most-read ones, due to the fact that our eyes movement is much comfortable in that way. So if you want a good design that makes people continue scrolling, put some anchor words/ links or buttons in the F pattern. This will ensure you’re working on an effective design to keep the business growing.

Load time 

If your webpage took more than 2 seconds to fully load, you’ll lose most of your visitors. Normally people will get pissed waiting for a website to load, and so are we. The longer it takes, the more uncomfortable your users will be. Try to maximize your site’s speed by moving to a better host, or choose a better hosting plan. Optimizing your images to reduce the sizes will also help ỉmove your web loading speed. And last but not least, you can try to minify HTML to reduce text files’ size. 

Obvious and straight to the point.

Don’t ask your customers to think, even just a moment. Everything you put on your website needs to be obvious, as much as possible. Don’t let any question pop up on users’ minds, since it’ll be much harder to convince them to purchase if there are too many questionable elements. Make a clear, simple, and self-explain structure, followed by easily recognizable clues to help users find their path. And that’s what we call a well-thought, nicely designed website.

All-device-friendly 

Nowadays, your site users could come from all types of devices, from laptops, PC screens to mobile devices or tablets. If you’ve encountered websites that work really well on PC, however, turns out mess up on mobile, you’ll understand. To make the most of your users’ interest, make sure your website design could be adapted to all sizes. This ensures the exact seamless experience no matter what device people are using. 

One focus point at a time

Let’s be honest, even we couldn't concentrate on huge blocks of text for too long. Meanwhile, images and videos are always easier to catch our attention. So make sure you mix up these components, creating a dynamic and bold impression all over your content. 

You can also use visual elements to guide users' attention to some specific areas of your web. The less you make them think, the more trust they’ll have towards your site, and they’ll be more likely to make a conversion.

3. 5 tips to keep your audience interested 

We know you have put a decent amount of money and time into developing a good quality website. From which, you would want to capture user’s attention and make people interested in the products you’re offering. However, the attention spans of users tend to be so short before they exit. There are 5 things you could do to improve on-site engagement! 

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Solve their problems: 

When people search for something online, most of the time people will try to find things that help them with their current situation. So in the very first few words, you must let them know what you have in your hands and what your values are. Don’t make it complicated for your users to figure out what you’re doing. After all, they could have millions of options on Google, showing that your brand, your products, or services are worth a try. 

Create useful blogs: 

Don’t let your site run without informative content, and by that we mean you should fill up your web page with blogs. Blog posts that contain meaningful information that relates to your brand are the best way to gain trust from online users. Your content should cover the topic that customers normally ask, infographics or videos that are relevant, and so on. Not only do these pages help you with SEO ranking, but also great to let people know that you care about creating value for your customers. 

Tell stories: 

Everyone loves a good story, it’s much more interesting than all the things that are eager to make sales. Storytelling is a form of art, and once you can control it, it will be your strongest weapon. Just make sure that the story you’re telling can be delicately reinforced to your points.  

Don’t just begin your blog with “Let me tell you a story…”. It’s just cliche and boring. Find a more creative way to tell your story, make it like friendly small talk between friends. 

Break time is always good: 

Allow your users’ eyes to have small breaks here and there. Don’t pack your entire webpage with graphics, text, and photos, people will soon feel tired. Instead, give them some blank space, or minimal graphics to have a break. Keeping them moving by your intentional design is extremely effective to keep visitors interested. 

Call to action at the right place: 

Be smart with your call to action. It’s the key to dive conversions and builds trust. Make sure each of your calls to action is fixed to the contents of each page. Let them know that you’ll give them what they’re looking for, prove your credibility or give out great offers just for them. Right CTAs placements will provide you with so many precious orders, sign-ups, and additional information from visitors, how could we miss out on that. 

When it comes to keeping your audience stay for longer, there must be a collision between website design, content, and development. The more you impress, catch their attention, the higher chance you will gain their trust and the urge to buy from you. Keep working on these elements to reach your goal, we know you could make it happen! 

If you love this post and want to know more about website design, see more great tips here.