Understanding the Basics of website design

If you are a web designer or have some knowledge about designing websites, chances are you are familiar with the changing trends of website design.

Although trends come and go, the basics remain the same.

In this article, let’s explore the basics of web design.

Visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy decides the right position for various design elements based on the browsing behavior of the target audience. For example, if a business is trying to target its products to UK citizens, the fact that most people navigate their eyes from left to right and top to down should be taken into account.

This might be true for other cultures as well.

Also, people today have less attention span, they tend to scan pages faster than reading them. You should consider these things while creating a visual hierarchy in your website design.

For instance, the Google web developers have put a lot of time and thought into this and created a layout for the search results page.

The important elements such as a call to action and logo need to be placed in the area where the user is likely to scan and pause.

After placement of elements, focus on font size, colors, spacing, typeface pairing and spacing to highlight them.

Grid systems

The grid system is still prominently used in many brochures, newspapers, and magazines. It is structuring of content in between the horizontal and vertical lines.

In the beginning, this system was directly borrowed from websites and now is used in different ways.

Some website designers, however, have tried to go beyond this in the name of creativity but very few have succeeded in developing good websites without following the grid system.

While using grid systems, keeping the designs responsive is important. There are different pre-made grid systems available. Some of the popular ones include Golden grid, Flexbox Grid, Bootstrap Grid, and Simple Grid.

Web-safe fonts

Now that browsers support almost anything and inclusion of @font-face CSS rule, it is confusing for the designer to choose the best one.

But a website designer should cross check if the font is web-safe to ensure that it is supported by the most popular browsers as some strange fonts are still not supported by all browsers.

If you are looking to use a really unique font, you might need to look at paid font types. Otherwise, there are a lot of free fonts on Google fonts. While using fonts, a designer can follow three key rules, first, do not use serif for body text, keep them reserved for headlines. For body text use sans-serif instead.

Second, reduce the number of fonts used in the text to two. Third, try to use fonts that are lightweight, that does not take a lot of space.

Colors and Image

Here, I wouldn’t say some colors are obnoxious and other are pleasing. Well, that can be true to a certain extent but colors become relevant based on the type of the website and creator’s vision for it.

The only basic rule on colors is don’t overdo it.

For this, keep the number of colors used to 2 or 3 and make sure they complement each other.

With images, avoid using flash.

Moving images if not expertly done can be annoying.

Use relevant images that have something useful to communicate.

Do not fill in the spaces, visitors can easily detect this. Avoid using big images as it increases website load time since images take the most loading time, around 60%. Lastly, do not choose copyrighted images.

Navigation

A good website will allow people to find the information they are looking for within a few seconds of eye movements. To make this possible. wherever necessary use bread crumbs, logical page hierarchy, and clickable buttons.

SEO Friendly

Good websites get a majority of their traffic from search engines. It is one of the fastest ways to grow your organic traffic. Websites should be designed in such a manner that search engines should be able to read your website. If you are not familiar with SEO, it’s prudent to hire a search engine optimization professional.

Conclusion

Before hiring a web design professional, it is important to understand the basics of web design. There are several platforms like StarOfService where you can list your requirements, and hire web design professionals. Today, almost every business is online, and there are more transactions that happen over the internet than the offline space. So it’s crucial to have strong foundations in web design.