Five exclusive tips for website designers

Web design is mainly a creative job. Ask any website designer, and it is fun and creativity rolled with little insights and lots of trends.

However, often web designers get carried away and sideline the fundamentals. Sometimes, monetary constraints don’t let the designers fully-utilise the web designing trends or the sheer ignorance of the bare essentials that make a website a fully-fledged storefront of a business. You can start learning with any website designing course to make much better and prefessional responsive websites.

With COVID-19, it is clear that a business needs a digital entity to thrive and stay alive in the market. A website isn’t a mere presence with the name of your company. It is a potent mean to bring in more customers, generate revenues and open new possibilities to expand your business. However, all your efforts to have a website that looks good and works well for your business can quickly derail with something as simple as these! If you are doing a website designing course or are a design enthusiast, it becomes all the more critical that you pay attention to these five simple design tenets that stand the test of time and are the stepping stone to brilliant website designing!

Not being picture-perfect: Stock photos are high-quality photos, but they are what they are. Produced in bulk and rarely doing justice to your product or services. You must have seen the photographs of same Hispanic or Caucasian couple too many times on websites-sometimes on Indian websites under ‘customer testimonies’ or ‘happy customers’ or worse, in a carousel slider. While it is okay to use stock images, use clean typography and some original design to touch those images up and stir up interest as well as trust. If you are setting up an e-commerce storefront, don’t compromise on high-quality photography of your products.

Neither fast nor furious: The increased loading time can adversely impact the bounce rate. The likelihood of a visitor leaving your website page rises with an increase in loading time of a website page. The bloated pages of desktop website and mobile websites can turn your customers away and thus, affect the overall revenue.

Clutter, clutter: Clutter is bad Feng Shui. For your website, it is even a bigger NO! Having an organised page helps as your customers are time-constrained and they don’t want to waste their time jumping from one website to another, going from one click to second. White space, clean interface and neat design- with a balanced approach of content and images-can work wonder for your business. ‘Occam’s Razor’ and Pareto Principle come in handy. Be ruthless and let the unnecessary elements go that doesn’t add any value to your page.

No Action: Your customers don’t have time to go through your website content, they scan through the content. You have two minutes to present them with a pop-up and CTA. Get them to sign up for your e-mail marketing campaign, give away your e-book or a trial subscription with strategically placed pop-ups. It is recommended not to experiment with the language too much and stay in the familiar territory of content here. However, you can experiment with the visual elements and offers as much as you want and keep changing it to gain more traction.  Go for A/B testing to ensure that you are on the right track.

Search engine first policy: Contrary to popular belief, your website doesn’t serve search engines. Yes, not even Google. It is meant for customers and to fulfil their intent of the search. If your website is unable to perform these basic duties, the customers will abandon the website as soon as they click on the link, leading to further drop in your ranking over the period. So, whether you are getting your website designed from scratch or redesigning it to accommodate the latest web design trends, keep your targeted demographics and their needs in mind. Your competitors’ websites can be a great place to start with for research into your customers’ mind and how you can do a better job.

When you would like to evaluate a website for its design and performance, take a page out of Steve Jobs’ design thinking philosophy.

“Design is not how it looks. It is about how it works.” 

Your website should meet the needs and expectations of your end customers and your business.If it does, the rankings and revenues will follow automatically. Keep editing the visual elements for better structure and simple interface. A neat website should look nonchalant, the epitome of Sprezzatura. While creating a website design is a time-extensive task, it is an exciting and challenging work that doesn’t present itself with a dull day. It involves lots of research and practical work that helps you grow as a designer with each passing day.