The process of organizing material online through planning, conceptualization, and design. Today, building a website involves more than just its look; it also takes into account how effectively it works overall. Web design includes user interface design, web applications, and mobile applications.
Did you realize that the way your website is designed may significantly affect how well it performs in search engines like Google? This post will provide you with some useful tips on how to design a website that not only looks great but also works well and achieves high search engine rankings.
- Finding Inspiration
- Choosing a Web Design Tool
- Visual Elements
- Functional Elements
Types of Web Design: Adaptive vs. Responsive
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Finding Inspiration
Designers look for inspiration everywhere. Some of the top websites that inspire your creativity are listed below:
- Behance
- Awwwards
- Web design inspiration
- Site Ins pire
Choosing a Web Design Tool
Using desktop software or website builders are the two primary methods for creating websites. The size of your team, your budget, the type of site you intend to build, and its technical requirements will all have a significant impact on the tool you ultimately select.
- Desktop Apps
Designers must produce their designs for desktop apps and deliver them to a development team so that they may be turned into code. Photoshop and Sketch are the most often used desktop applications for website design.
For large and/or complex websites, this is typically the standard since it allows the designer to concentrate on the overall look while handing off all technical challenges to the development team. Unfortunately, this procedure might be expensive and time-consuming because it requires multiple resources, skill sets, and team members.
It is advantageous to utilize a website builder to create a website with less technical needs in order to avoid hiring a developer.
- Website Builders
Today’s market is filled with website builders that provide a variety of features and services. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and PageCloud are examples of well-known website builders with various design capabilities, template options, costs, and general editing experiences. Do your homework, test out some of the free options, and choose the platform that best suits the requirements of your website.
Each of the adaptable or adaptive websites created by website builders offers a different building experience. We’ll go through these concepts in more detail below so you can choose the builders who are best for you. If you don’t know how to code, it’s essential to comprehend the capabilities and limitations of different website design tools. Because it offers few customization options, WordPress, although the most popular website platform, is not well-liked by graphic designers.
Before you begin building your website, determine its requirements: Will you be making a photo gallery? How frequently will your website be updated? Do you require a form of contact? Choose a website builder that will allow you to accomplish those goals.
Web Design Elements
It’s critical to take both the website’s aesthetic and operation into account while building one. The performance of your website includes its capacity to lure users, standing in search results, searchability, and loading speed.
The following concise overview lists the factors you should take into account while building your website to ensure everything functions effectively. To get you started, each section provides hints and recommendations.
Written copy
The layout and content of your website work best together. For the purpose of producing a design that is coherent and has balanced features, it is crucial to have your content writers and designers collaborate. Create text chunks that go with your photographs and photos by using text blocks.
Fonts
Pick a typeface that works well with your design as a whole. Your website’s font selection should complement its colour scheme, graphics, and pictures and support its overall tone. By using resources like Canva’s Font Combinator, you could discover the perfect match for your typeface. Even within their software, web design tools like PageCloud provide a wide variety of font combinations.
Colors
The selection of colours is one of the most important considerations when creating a website. Remember that there are many myths about the psychology of color, therefore it’s more crucial to concentrate on choosing hues that go well with the overall style and tone of your website. Integrate the colour scheme of your brand with the messages you wish to convey to your audience.
Layout
The way you decide to arrange your content will have a big influence on the usability and operation of your site. While choosing a layout, there are a few important considerations to keep in mind, but there are no set rules to follow. Keep in mind the requirements of your target audience and avoid choosing a too interesting layout that can divert attention from the concepts you want to convey.
Shapes
Using visual elements in web design might improve the site’s overall appearance and the seamless fusion of text and images. By fusing beautiful colours and forms, you can draw users’ attention and improve the site’s overall flow.
Spacing
For websites to be aesthetically beautiful and simple to browse, spacing is a crucial component. Your design will use space in one form or another in every aspect. The optimum balance of text, pictures, and graphics requires the effective use of whitespace.
It could be simpler for visitors to navigate your website if the spacing remains constant. Undoubtedly, the concept of whitespace is prioritised by modern web designers.
Images & Icons
Amazing designs have the ability to instantly communicate a lot of information. To do this, effective imagery and iconography are employed. Choose images and icons that strengthen and reinforce your viewpoint. You may find thousands of options by just searching Google for stock images and icons. Here are some of our favorites to narrow down your search:
Free images and icons
- Pexels
- Unsplash
- iconmonstr
Videos
More and more web designers are include video in their creations. When utilised effectively, videos may provide people with an understanding or experience that word or picture alone cannot provide.
Remember that guests’ eyes are drawn to moving pictures, much like when a TV is on in a restaurant. Make sure your movies don’t conflict with or overshadow other crucial components.
Functional elements
It is crucial to consider these practical elements while developing your website. A well-functioning website is essential for both excellent search engine rankings and the greatest user experience.
Navigation
One of the key components that determine if your website is operating effectively is its navigation. Depending on your target audience, your navigation may serve a variety of purposes, such as making it easier for new users to learn about the features of your site, making it quicker for frequent visitors to access your pages, and improving the user experience for all visitors. For further navigational advice, go over these recommended practices.
User Interactions
Depending on their device, your site visitors can engage with it in a number of different ways (scrolling, clicking, typing, etc.). The best website designs keep these interactions straightforward to give the user a sense of control. Here are a few illustrations:
- Never enable automatic playback of audio or video.
- Make sure that all forms are mobile-friendly,
- avoid pop-up windows,
- Unless the text is clickable, never underline it.
- and stay away from scroll-jacking.
Animations
Numerous online animation techniques exist that can draw viewers’ attention to your design and encourage interaction with your website by soliciting comments. For example, the addition of “like” buttons or forms keeps website visitors interested. Keep your animations basic if you’re new to web design to prevent developer interference.
Speed
A sluggish website is disliked by everybody. A visitor may not stay on your website or return if a page takes more than a few seconds to load. No matter how appealing, a site that loads slowly will not rank well in search (i.e., will not rank well on Google).
Although there are no assurances, the best website designers frequently reduce your content for faster loading. Make sure to conduct thorough research on the website builders that will best suit the material on your website. For websites with huge and/or numerous photographs, PageCloud, for instance, optimizes your images to guarantee quick loading times.
Site structure
The organization of a website affects user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). Your website should have no structural problems that prevent people from effortlessly navigating it. It’s likely that “crawlers” are having trouble navigating your site if people are having trouble doing so. An automatic tool known as a crawler (or both) looks through your website to assess its functioning. Poor site ranking and user experience might result from poor navigation.
Cross-browser & cross-device compatibility
All devices and browsers should display a stunning design with polish (yes, even Internet Explorer). If you’re creating your website from scratch, we advise employing a cross-browser testing tool to speed up and improve the effectiveness of this laborious process. The cross-browser testing, on the other hand, is normally handled by the company’s development team if you’re utilising a website-building platform, leaving you to concentrate on design.
Types of Website Design: Adaptive vs. Responsive
Knowing the benefits and drawbacks of responsive and adaptable websites will make it simpler for you to select the website builder that will satisfy your website design objectives.
Online articles on a variety of website design trends may be found by you (fixed, static, fluid, etc.). However, in today’s mobile-centric world, just two website styles—adaptive and responsive—should be used to correctly build a website.
Flexible webpages
Two or more versions of a website that are tailored for different screen sizes are used in adaptive web design. Based on how the website determines what size needs to be shown, adaptive websites may be divided into two primary categories:
- Adapts based on device type
Your browser includes a “user-agent” option in an HTTP request that tells a website’s server what sort of device is making the request. The adaptable website will determine which version of the site to display based on the device attempting to access it (i.e., desktop, mobile, tablet). On a desktop, if the browser window is minimised, issues will arise since the website will continue to display the “desktop version” rather than scaling to the new size.
- Adapts based on browser width
Instead of using the “user-agent,” the website shifts between versions using breakpoints (defined width widths) and media queries (a CSS feature that allows a webpage to adapt to numerous screen sizes). Now of a desktop, tablet, and mobile version, you will instead have variants with sizes of 1080 pixels, 768 pixels, and 480 pixels. This provides you more design possibilities and enhances user experience because your website will adapt based on screen width.
Pros
- Cross-browser and cross-device compatibility
- a visual editor (what you see is what you get)
- Custom designs are faster and easier to construct without coding
- Fast-loading pages
Cons
- Why Certain effects that only responsive webpages may achieve are restricted on “device-type” websites when viewed in a smaller browser window on a desktop.
Responsive Websites
Flexible grid layouts can be used for responsive websites that are based on the proportion that each element occupies in its container. For example, if a header occupies 25% of its container, that percentage will not vary no matter how the screen size changes. While adaptive websites simply adapt when they reach a breakpoint, responsive websites are continually altering to fit the screen size. Responsive websites may also employ breakpoints to provide a unique design for each screen size.
Pros
- Responsive website builders are often stiff, making the design difficult to “break,” and
- they provide a great user experience on all screen sizes regardless of the type of device.
- Lots of starting templates are available
Cons
- Extensive design and testing are necessary to assure quality (when starting from scratch)
- Custom designs might be difficult without access to the code.
It’s crucial to remember that website builders may incorporate both responsive and adaptable features. By way of illustration, PageCloud has unveiled a number of technologies that enable your content to behave responsively even when the website is still adaptable.
