The digital world is taking a new shape, with almost everyone showing interest in creating their websites. Of course, a professional web design goes a long way in attracting huge traffic, which translates to a business’s success. As the world continues to embrace digital marketing, it is a wise idea for every business to utilize the vast online space to increase their sales. Unfortunately, like any other innovation, it seems very hard for some new websites to get noticed among the thousands of competitors already available.
So, how can a new brand benefit from the overcrowded e-commerce space? The answer lies in one key aspect; utilizing professional web design services to create a beautiful website with all aspects that the audience needs. For instance, almost 48 percent of people admit that the website design is what determines if they will trust the business. That means, whatever the designers do, they should prioritize the audience’s needs. That said, this article shares some of the vital tips every web design agency should consider when creating a company’s website. It also gives beautiful web design examples to check out.
Only use relevant elements to make the website simple and easy-to-navigate
When building a website from scratch, you will need to start with wireframing it. A website’s wireframe is an overall structure that shows what your website will look like. It also determines the audience’s first impression since it gives a solid idea of how easy the website is to navigate. In simple words, a wireframe gives all the aspects of a web design, including its layout, the navigational hierarchy, and where every content will go. That means professional websites don’t necessarily need to make everything fancy. Instead, they can only use a simple structure to hit the target market.
Good web design should incorporate a brand’s logo, primary and secondary menus, headlines, and subheadings. It should also display an easily accessible call-to-action button (CTA), background image, list of services, content, and testimonials. All the buttons on the website’s homepage, including the call-to-action button, should also be responsive to avoid leaving visitors confused. Therefore, although there are no hard rules to determine what every e-commerce website should look like, the point here is to use only elements that meet your target user’s needs. Avoid using a lot of complicated elements that will push your audience away.
Example:
Zillow is a good example of a website design that focuses only on elements that add value. The website has a minimalistic audience approach, lively colors, easily accessible push buttons, and detailed information.
Prioritize your audience
The primary reason to design a website is to reach your target market and increase sales. Hence, your audience should be the first thing to pop up in your mind. For instance, most professional web designers advise that, as far as creating a unique and comprehensive website is concerned, your users should come first. That means you should make it as user-friendly as possible. However, the biggest question is, how do you create a beautiful website while making it a positive user experience (UX)?
A web design company can only give a website the user experience it deserves by considering the following tips:
- Providing a visually solid hierarchy. Visitors can gather information and navigate the website easily if it has a solid hierarchy. Some of the visual hierarchy elements to consider include colors, white spaces, spacing, and many more.
- Using a simple structure. Use only simple structural elements that do not confuse visitors and limit them from coming back.
- Include clear call-to-action buttons (CTA). CTA buttons such as “Place an Order”, “Buy Now”, “Contact Us”, and “Sign Up” should always direct visitors to the respective pages. Active CTAs translate to more sales since visitors are easily convinced to take the next step.
- Make everything easily accessible. Always focus on building a responsive web design and making it accessible from any device. When designing your website, ask yourself if all users can view its elements on PCs, tablets, or mobile phones.
Example:
When talking about beautiful web design examples that prioritize their visitors, Zillow still wins the battle. The website has a comprehensive homepage that helps visitors access every information they need. The homepage also has three main CTAs, including buying, selling, and renting a home, which simplifies the users’ navigation.
Pick the right colors that speak about your brand’s goals
There exist a lot of color theories and combinations, including contrasting schemes and conventions on monochrome. However, not all of these theories work for every brand; hence, your choice of colors narrows down to common sense and how your audience will feel about them. When deciding which color combination to use on your website, you may want to check out as many websites as possible to know how colors match. You may also want to consider how the audience will view the brand and the meaning of each color you pick.
As a rule of thumb, choose only two or three base colors for your website. After that, you can use tints and shades of these base colors to expand your color palette where necessary. Tints are lighter colors mixed with white while shades are darker colors mixed with black. Also, remember to pick colors that match what the brand offers. For instance, a website dealing with food looks professional when it uses earthy colors such as red and brown. Therefore, whichever color combination you choose, remember to keep everything simple and professional, while conveying the right message.
Example:
Dunkin’ and Bence Kucsan’ are examples of web designs that use professional color schemes to make them stand out. Dunkin uses pink and oranges colors throughout the website to make the brand consistent. People visiting the website for the first time can easily tell what the business deals with. On the other hand, Bence Kucsan’s website uses monochromatic (tints and shades of a single color) and achromatic (black and white) color schemes to make it unique. It also uses the red color to avoid making everything on the site dull. Use Enhanced Typography
The website’s typography covers a wide range of elements. Although it is often categorized as a branch of web development, one can spend a lot of time trying to master all the required aspects. Therefore, to summarize the topic, we will only focus on the major typography elements to consider when going for an eCommerce web design.
Web Typography vs. Print Typography
Most web design systems lack control over the appearance of web typography due to the dynamic characters involved. Unlike print typography, web typography has various dynamics that lead to varied strengths, missing fonts on computers, browser differences, platform rendering, and low-quality support in CSS. Sometimes, these dynamics can make web typography frustrating, especially to new website developers. Therefore, it is upon the award-winning web designers to overcome the challenges and create easy-to-read website content.
Web design font choice
The font style you choose determines how easily visitors will read the content on your site. Here, you need to consider vital aspects such as font stacks, which are basic CSS that let you determine the order in which fonts should appear. Font stacks also let you define your typing fallbacks, meaning that whenever your defined typeface is missing, your browser can easily pick the next in line. Therefore, when choosing the font style to use, avoid using too many fonts that will lead to a negative impression from your readers. This applies to a company’s blog or WordPress, where readers will need to grasp more information.
Measure and leading
The length of lines (measure) and their vertical spacing or height (leading) are also crucial typography elements to check. Measure and leading affect the content’s readability significantly; thus, visitors won’t be comfortable reading too long or too short lines. Generally, maintain your characters between 40 and 80 per line and a height of 1.5 for paragraphs.
Bullets and hanging quotes
Whether you want to attract more traffic to your blog or business online, always use the right hanging quotes and bullets. Although hanging quote marks do not significantly disrupt the flow of the text, they can also affect the readability and visitor’s engagement. Therefore, instead of leaving the bulleted text and quotes in default alignment, you can easily align them horizontally with the rest of the content on the page.
Example:
Zola’s website is an example of a web design that focuses on ease of readability and positive experience. The site uses a consistent font style to make everything uniform, easy to understand, and appealing. For example, on their Blog section, they use bold headings, and normal texts, and display every link with a light blue color for easy identification.
Use visually connecting elements
When talking about visually connecting elements, what should come to your mind is the unity and consistency of your web design. A professional web design agency should always focus on one unified message to make the website consistent. Therefore, when choosing elements to use on the website, it is vital to consider how different elements will interact. You should also consider how visitors will relate to the elements.
Different elements to add to a website include images, videos, and infographics. While some companies will find videos and photos visually appealing, others will only benefit from infographics that pass the message with simple tactics. Therefore, when choosing videos, photos, or infographics to embed on your website, always review their meaning and how they relate to your business needs. Avoid throwing visual elements anyhow on your website since they can push visitors away rather than attract them.
Most web designers dream of including visual elements in their websites. However, their dreams are shattered due to various reasons such as lack of element compatibility and functionality. Thus, the choice of visual elements to use depends on various factors such as the loading time, size, visibility on different devices, user’s internet connection, computers’ processing powers, and programming qualities. Generally, when using visual elements to make new or improve an existing website, always prioritize your user’s comfortability.
Example:
Airbnb is among websites that have visually appealing elements. The site has eye-catching photos that showcase different homes and destinations for people looking for conducive places to spend some time away from home. The choice of images keeps visitors engaged on the website, leading to huge traffic.
Test your website and improve where necessary
The last tip to make your website beautiful and responsive is to test all elements before releasing it to the audience. Remember, your first attempt may not give the best and most responsive web design. Before launching your business online, you need to test and see if the website will have the desired user’s positive experience. To achieve this, you can A/B test all elements on your site individually to see how they impact the site’s performance. You can also integrate Google Analytics with your website to track all the activity and give a clear picture of how people click on your CTA buttons.
Sometimes, testing and changing elements on your site do not need bigger changes. You only need to focus on smaller changes that go a long way in changing how people will interact with your site. For example, you can change the CTAs to direct visitors to individual pages instead of general pages. You can also change the typography and visual elements to target a specific audience, especially based on the traffic.
Example:
Campos developers could test all the elements on the site to determine how they impact the business’s appearance and performance. For example, they could test CTA buttons and their colors to see how changing them can impact the site visitors. They could also test the icons such as shopping carts to see people’s experience with icons and written words.
The bottom line
If you have an online store, you might be thinking about investing in professional web design systems to get a beautiful site for your business. However, before reaching this point, you are probably asking yourself what defines beauty when talking about web designs. A beautiful web design is something creative, appealing, and different from others. Building a beautiful website leads to increased traffic to your business, translating to increased profits. Therefore, if you want a responsive web design within the shortest time possible, it is time to try award-winning web designers for reliable results.
