10 Tips For Effective Web Designing in 2024

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. 
-Steve Jobs

Within just 10-15 seconds, a visitor landing on your website can decide whether to stay or leave. Regardless of the complexity of the backend code, if your UI/UX design isn’t impressive, users will lose interest and bounce. Website design is subjective, as what’s appealing to one user may not be to another, making it a complex and creative job. It’s not just about adding content and elements for beauty; it’s also about creating a user-friendly experience. 

If users can’t grasp your website’s purpose, struggle with navigation, or find the layout confusing, it’s crucial to address these issues. Poor website design can leave a negative impression. Let’s explore essential factors and tips for effective website designing.

What is Web Designing?

Web designing is the process of creating websites. It encompasses several different aspects, including webpage layout, content production, and graphic design. While the terms web design and web development are often used interchangeably, web design is technically a subset of the broader category of web development.

Tips For Effective Web Designing

Creating an effective website requires careful consideration of various elements. Here are some tips to enhance your web design:

1. Have a Purpose and Plan

A user needs a reason to visit an application and that’s why your website should clearly explain or convey the services or products you are offering to the users. Your website and each page of it should have a purpose and clear specification that what it does. According to the goal (entertainment website, e-commerce site, social media, etc.) of your website make a rough sketch and identify all crucial elements (like navigation, contact information, call to action, search, footer, buttons, images, layouts) that you need to include on your website. 
Understand your website from users’ points of view and plan according to that. Before you jump to the code figure out what’s your user’s expectation is, what pages they are going to view, what content they are going to read, and according to that find out where you want elements to go.  

2. Simplicity

Complexity is scary and in web designing less-is-more approaches work more effectively. Make your website simple and try to display one detail at a time for getting the individual attention of each part. Most people put everything on the same page whatever they want on their website, which makes the screen cluttered and users get distracted and confused. Here are some tips to keep in mind for designing a clean and simple website… 

• Don’t overload the information on the home page of your website. If there is too much content or information, keep them on the inner pages. Also, make your website consistent in terms of font family, font size, colors, images, headings, and other aspects.
• Include white spaces in your design. Give enough padding, margin, and space between sections, paragraphs, and boxes. It highlights the content and makes your website easy to use.
• Limit the pull-out menus (drop-downs, fold-outs, etc.) and avoid using sidebars, sliders, accordions, tabs, and carousels which most web designers prefer to include on the website. The user gets distracted and ignores the rest of the useful content on the website. Research at Notre Dame University also says that we should avoid using carousels to draw the users’ attention and increase the number of clicks.

3. Readability

Users should not face difficulty in reading the text on your website so you need to pay attention to the contrast between your text and its background. A lot of people use a background image with text over it where the image doesn’t have any overlay and the text gets blended with the image. You should use some dark overlay over the image and then the text over that to make your content readable. 
The same goes for the colored background, for example, don’t use a dark gray color background with slightly lighter text over it instead of that use white color text, which will be more visible and readable. Also, don’t make the font size too small, keep your body text at least 16pt and take care of whitespaces between elements. Sans Serif typefaces are much preferable to use on the website. 

4. Responsiveness

People use mobile devices for most of their browsing and 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. These all are the reasons that your application should be viewable on different devices. Text, layout, images all the elements of your website should be viewable and accessible on different devices for a better user experience. Learn to use CSS grid, media queries, and bootstrap frameworks to make your application responsive or mobile-friendly.  

5. Simple Navigation

Visitors will definitely move away from your website if they won’t be able to find out the things they are looking for and that’s the reason paying attention to the navigation of your website is extremely important. Navigation organizes your complete website and guides a user to move around your application. The navigation menu should be on the top and sticky on your website so if a user scrolls down the webpage they can still find and access the menu on your website. Below are some tips to make easy-to-navigate applications… 

• Use the “three click rule” in your application that allows users to get all the information they need in 3 clicks.
• More items in the menus confuse the visitors so try to list the items less than 7 also try to avoid dropdown menus, it becomes difficult for search engines to crawl drop-down menus.
• The brand logo of your website should redirect to a user on the homepage.
• You can include some important menus (For example terms of use/FAQ/contact/blog etc.), a shortened version of your menu, or social icons in your footer. 

6. Call To Action

It’s very important in your website to have a clear call to action button or form that indicates the next step or action the user should take on a page to accomplish the task. For example, buy now, sign up, contact form, subscription, registration form, social media button, etc. CTA provides some sort of direction to the user once he/she knows the purpose of the website. Without CTA user won’t be able to find that whether he/she needs to purchase a product, do some kind of registration, or take a subscription and the user may leave the website without completing the final task. It’s good if you keep your CTA above the fold so the visitor can find it right in front of them.  

7. Load Speed

People are very impatient and they are not going to wait for too long if your website speed is slow. Most of the user moves away from the website within just 5 seconds if their id doesn’t load fast. The size of images or videos makes a big impact on website speed so try to compress the image before you add it there. Also, combine code into a central CSS or JavaScript file to reduce the HTTP requests. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (compressed to speed up their load time). Limit the large items on your website and choose the right host. 

8. Prioritize Scrolling

We have already mentioned that you should avoid sliders or accordions to present a lot of information on the website. The best way to present more content and fit that into your website is by using the scrollbar. It has been found in one of the studies that conversion rates increase by up to 30% when you add a scrolling feature to your webpage. 

9. Pick Up The Right Images

A picture says a lot about a website and choosing the right image for your website can get a lot of visitors. We highly recommend you use high-quality optimized speed which doesn’t affect your website speed. You can take images from professionals or from photo stock that provides high-quality images with a natural look. Your image should clearly speak the type of message you want your user to understand. Adding photos of people can increase the conversion rates of your website.  

10. Color Palette

The color of your website should match the brand of your website. Choosing the right color to represent your brand is very important. You also need to take care of contrast while choosing the color. When you are choosing colors for your website they should go well with each other also your text should be clear and readable. Your choice of color should not clash with each other for example don’t use purple and red colors next to each other, it will make your site ugly. Use a single color for the main element (primary), highlights (secondary), and other less-important elements (background). You also need to keep in mind that your primary, secondary, and background colors should be consistent throughout your entire site. Vibrant colors create emotion so they should be used sparingly (e.g. for buttons and call to action).

Conclusion

In conclusion, effective website design requires a clear purpose, simplicity, readability, responsiveness, simple navigation, clear call-to-action, fast load speed, prioritized scrolling, the right choice of images, and a suitable color palette. By following these Tips For Effective Web Designing, you can create a website that not only looks good but also functions effectively to meet the needs of your users.