How To Achieve Effective Web Design For Your Brand

Less is Always More

You want to make a great first impression, so it’s tempting to want to create a show stopping design; to want to incorporate as much as you possibly can to show what you can do and what you offer, and to highlight all of the reasons why you’re the best option to choose. Resist the temptation. When it comes to effective webs design, less is always more. As Barry Schwartz, the psychologist who authored The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less says, the more options you’re offered, the more likely it is that you’ll choose nothing at all. In regard to website design, this theory absolutely applies. 

If your website is jam-packed with options, while you might think that you’re making it easier for site visitors to find what they’re looking for and make a choice, in reality, you’ll actually end up overwhelming them. The visitors who landed on your site did so with a purpose. They had an objective when they searched for the products and/or services that you offered, and almost 100 percent of the time, that objective wasn’t to be dazzled by showy design skills. Sure, fancy typography, flashy colours, and interesting layouts can be exciting and visually pleasing, but all of these things can be really distracting, and can take a visitor’s attention away from the reason why they went to your website in the first place. 

With the above in mind, if you’ve already designed your website, carefully examine it. If there’s anything that doesn’t offer specific value and that really doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it! If you’re setting out to design your website, when you’re planning, avoid incorporating anything that won’t prove to be beneficial – both to your visitors and to achieving your own goals. Think of your website as real estate; don’t waste precious space on décor that isn’t necessary. Websites that are sleek and simple are much more likely to stand the test of time. Moreover, the more simplistic your site design is, the easier it will be to navigate, and the quicker your visitors will be able to find what they came there for in the first place. 

Negative space or whitespace – that is, space that is intentionally left empty – can offer real value to the design of a website; especially when it’s strategic. Examples of negative spaces include the blocks between blocks of text and images, the blank spots in the page margins, and even the space between the words and the letters. It might not seem like it, but this negative space is an extremely important element of web design, and if you want your website’s design to be effective, then making use of it is imperative. A website that lacks enough negative space will appear cluttered, messy, confusing, and can even be off-putting. A site that features thoughtful negative space looks clean, neat, orderly, and professional. It also helps visitors focus on the key features. 

Aesthetics are Key 

It doesn’t matter how thoughtful, useful, engaging, and well-written the content is, if your site lacks visual appeal, there’s a good chance that you’re losing out on conversions. Effective web design includes three key aesthetic elements: 

• Colour
• Typography
• Balance

Colour

Colour elicits an emotional response; hence why it’s a crucial part of effective web design. For instance, cool hues, such as blues, greens, and purples, convey tranquillity and calmness, while warmer tones, such as oranges and pinks encourage excitement and make people feel energised. Bold colours, like red and yellow, have been found to elicit a feeling of hunger – hence why so many fast food places use these two hues in their logos!

When you’re selecting the colour palette for your site, aim to achieve the ideal balance of contrast and harmony. If the colors scheme is too severely contrasting (violet and neon yellow, for example) can be quite jarring and distracting. For the best effect, focus on colours that are in the same family. Skip using bold and bright colours on the background of your site pages; rather, they’re best reserved for the CTAs. You also want to make sure that the colour scheme is consistent with your brand, and that it appeals to your target audience. Picking colours that coordinate with your logo is a great way to go!

Typography

Typography is surprisingly powerful and has a significant impact on a website’s design. For instance, fonts that are more ornate lend an air of sophistication and are more serious, while more streamlined prints offer a modern look. 

When selecting font for your website, there are a few rules you should stick to: reserve Sans Serif for the text used in the body, utilise a max of three typefaces, and the size of the font should be between 12 and 16 pts. By sticking to these three rules of thumb, the body text will be easier to read, while edgier, more playful fonts would be better suited for headlines, but do keep them consistent. 

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Thought it most certainly sounds cliché, it’s absolutely the truth! There’s a good reason why this saying came to be, and it’s because pictures really do convey a great deal of info a lot faster than large chunks of text. In effective web design, images should be strategically placed so as to guide visitors – in a subtle way – to wherever it is that you want them to go. In a way, images function as arrows; they can be used to direct a visitor’s attention toward key conversion points, such as “Click Here”, “Shop Now”, “Sign Up Here”, and “Contact Us”, for example. 

When you’re selecting images to use on your website, bear in mind that quality is key! Make sure you stick with high resolution images, and that the images tie in with the overall of the site. Furthermore, it’s incorporating images of people is highly recommended, as the eyes are naturally drawn to pay attention to and recognize faces. If you’re utilising stock photographs, be mindful that you don’t choose an image that looks like it’s overly staged; rather, go for something that appears natural. 

Whenever possible, rather than using text, consider incorporating infographics. Why? Well, because they’re a highly effective way to transmit information while grabbing the attention of site users. Rather than reading blocks of text, the average visitor skims through a website; hence why infographics are a much better way to communicate pertinent information. 

Consistency is Everything

The American politician, Lincoln Chafee, once said, “Trust is built with consistency.” That statement is absolutely applicable to effective website design. 

Establishing trust is one of the key goals of your website, and one of the easiest ways to build that trust is with your web design; more specifically, with the consistency of the design elements. In other words, if you want your web design to be as effective as possible, the design elements must be consistent across your site. 

The following are some of the ways that you can incorporate consistency into your web design: 

• Use the same navigation or menu bar on each of your site’s pages. The location, the fonts, and the colour scheme of your navigation or menu bar should be the same on each page of your website. 
• Incorporate the same type of visual imagery across your site. For instance, featuring vector art on the homepage and lifestyle stock images on the rest of the pages can be really disjointing and unappealing. Effective web design calls for a single consistent theme throughout the entire website. 
• While switching up the layouts on different pages is fine, and in fact, can be beneficial, as doing so can increase the visual appeal; however, do keep in mind that the layouts should match. 
• A lack of equivalence between landing pages ads, and your site can be a huge deterrent for users that you are hoping will make the shift from visitor to customer. 

UX Needs to Be a Top Priority

UX, short for “user experience”, has a huge impact on the overall success of your website, and thus, on the overall success of your business. Whether or not your website will be effective largely depends on the usability and functionality of its design. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your site is, all of your efforts will be for naught if it’s lacking an effective user experience. 

When you’re designing or redesigning your website, the users should always be at the forefront of your mind. Consider how users would like to interact with your site; what they would like to see, what type of information they would like to find, etc. When you’re implementing your web design, make sure that you cater to those needs.