Getting a website up and running nowadays, is easier than breathing.
But having a website, doesn’t guarantee it will be a success.
Your website can be whatever you want it to be. When a visitor first arrives on your site, they will quickly determine whether or not it’s a place of interest. For this reason, you want to make good first impressions.
Think of it like this, if you had a physical store, like a clothes shop or restaurant, you’d want it to be inviting and interesting. There are so many ornaments you could and would likely use, to adorn your establishment, many of which are fairly cheap.
If you respect your visitors, then you will take all the time you need, to create an environment that’s enticing, something that would compel others to want to support it. You don’t want your establishment to be like the rest, you want it to stand out. You want your establishment to be the place to be or go.
That’s the same way you should look at your websites design efforts.
Below you will find a list of 6 of the best practices for an effective web design – so please enjoy.
1. Clean Site Design
You want a website that is easy for people to browse through, so that they can quickly find whatever they seek.
To do that, you need to take into consideration the thought processes of your visitors. You don’t want to go with a site design that is overwhelming, littered with images, with bright colours. Instead, go with a site that is fun and enjoyable for them to navigate through, with high quality content.
The best way to do this is to create your own design hierarchy. Which is essentially, your sites design elements, arranged in order of effectiveness and importance. For example, if you were to have a large and imposing headline, with bright, contrasting colours fixed on the centre of your page, it would immediately come across to the end user as something more significant than the other images and design elements around it.
You also want to use the white space on your site. White space is basically the empty or negative areas of your site. They typically exist within your sites design elements, such as content and images. When you design your site with its white space in mind, you create a site that is more digestible and easy to quickly browse through.
2. Choose the Right Colour Scheme
Take some time to go through different colour schemes before you settle on something. The colour scheme you decide to go with, will be associated with that site for its entire life cycle. The better marketed sites and companies are oftentimes linked to their chosen colour schemes. Any decision you go with, should match up with your primary product(s). For example, if you’re running a toy website, then you want to go with bright colours, like yellows and oranges etc. However, if it’s a personal site, then there shouldn’t be any restriction on what you go with.
3. Mobile-First Design
When designing your site, you want to think about mobile before anything else. As of right now, around 55% of all web traffic takes place on a mobile device.
When you take the time to learn how your viewers are interacting with your site, it will help you more effectively improve it. One of the easiest ways you can optimize your site is by making it mobile friendly.
That said, when it comes to designing a mobile first website, there are some restrictions for you to consider. Mobile devices have smaller screens, and people typically interact with the content using their hands, as opposed to a mouse on your standard desktop unit. But you shouldn’t look at it as a negative thing, as these restrictions can make for a leaner, more optimised website.
With a site targeted for mobile users, you can ensure that it reaches the largest possible audience.
4. Optimize Your Site’s Speed
As the internet continues to grow, more and more end users enter the fold, and many of them aren’t nearly as patient as those that came before them. Back in the day, the internet was significantly slower, and thus, users were accustomed to waiting an age for just about anything to happen. However, today, most users will leave, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load up. Users are more likely to leave your site, for a competitor, which could potentially hurt its rankings in the major searching engines.
To optimise your website, you need to use more streamlined code, and content that is easy to load. It’s also ideal if you go with a hosting service that is fast and reliable.
Webflow is a web design service that is capable of constructing well coded sites, as you drag and drop via its editor. Of course, there are many rules and principles that you’d still need to abide by, when creating your site, as this would ensure best practices.
Additionally, Webflow also has its own hosting service, which is something you may want to consider looking into – especially if you want a faster website.
5. Fix 404s
If the web server is unable to locate a web page, it will display the infamous 404 error. You want to avoid these errors as much as possible, by implementing redirects to the home page or some other content.
To determine whether or not you have any 404 errors on your site, you can log into Google Search Console. When you look into the Search Console, you will be given a number of tools and tips you can use to safely diagnose and repair such URL issues.
6. A/B Testing
A/B testing is a term used to describe the process of comparing various versions of the same web page, to determine which one is best. This may include assessing the effectiveness of a sites CTA, testing headlines to see which get the best response, and changing colour schemes – to name a few. When you take the time to acquire the right data, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process of improving your site. You want to make site decisions based on actionable data – as that will always yield the best results.
AUTHOR INFO—
Uchenna Ani- Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website.