7 Essential Elements of Web Design

When designing your website, your audience and your customers should be at the forefront of your mind. Responsive design allows your site to be redistributed according to screen size. This often means changing the design of the site, using smaller navigation, smaller images and logos, and increasing the font size, to name a few. An optimized architecture will ensure that your site can be crawled by search engines, effectively indexed and loaded quickly when users visit it.

At the heart of usability and user experience on small business websites is the navigation feature. Sites with redundant and effective navigation links provide the user with a better experience and allow him to move around the site effectively and efficiently. The process of defining the navigation menus of your site and those useful links in the footer and universally in the sidebar should begin long before the design and development process. Insightful navigation begins to take place in the planning process as the information architecture of the website is framed and defined.

There is no strict and fast standard for navigation. Every website should be designed to highlight fundamental content and subtly guide users where they don't know they want to go yet. That is the power of effective navigation. Font size is also important.

While users can increase the size of fonts on their computers or devices, not everyone knows how. Tiny blocks of text can look very clean, but if no one can read them, what is the point? 12-point used to be pretty standard, but that's getting in the 16-point range more often, which works well on desktops and phones. You can go even bigger on your device than on your desktop, thanks to the responsive design, as mentioned above. Give your users a seamless experience by testing on more than 3000 real devices and browsers.

Don't compromise on emulators and simulators Effective web design not only creates visual appeal, but also implements favorable SEO optimization techniques to help the site rank better in Google searches. While there are hundreds of design elements to choose from, some of them are indispensable. First of all, a mobile friendly design refers to the use of a responsive website design. Responsive web design refers to a design strategy that allows websites to “adapt” to different screen sizes without compromising usability and user experience.

Text, UI elements, and images are scaled and resized depending on the viewport. Test the effectiveness of your responsive website design with BrowserStack's free responsive design checker. Just enter the URL and your website will appear on a variety of real devices: iPhone X, Galaxy Note 10, iPhone 8 Plus, Galaxy S9 Plus and more. Web pages that load in five seconds experience a bounce rate of 38%.

A 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%. Numbers like these should describe the importance of speed in modern web design, both on desktop and mobile devices. As a minimalist design element, white space is essential for modern home page design. As the Internet subjects all users to an infinite barrage of information, they can quickly reach a point of intellectual exhaustion.

Using a balance between white space and content ensures that the site looks clean, organized, readable and easy to navigate. Unless evaluators and designers have a real in-house device lab that they can access 24/7, they should take advantage of cloud-based testing solutions that provide the same. In that case, they simply have to load the software and run the necessary tests on real devices. Interested in how you can test JavaScript in browsers? Dive in to learn about 5 t-practices online.

Listen to the most downloaded B2B sales podcast in the world Background videos focus on attracting the visitor from the moment they land on your page. Video allows the visitor to understand the key points of your company without having to read a single line of text. Many B2B websites are starting to display large product images on their sites to highlight different features or parts of their products, and this is not by chance. Card design is becoming increasingly popular on B2B and B2C websites because it helps provide users with easily digestible bits of information.

Using this design on your site can help highlight several products or solutions in parallel. In addition to background videos, short product or feature videos are also popular, as they can be used to highlight a specific use case. These short videos are great for bringing your solution to life, without overwhelming the visitor with a long experience they must experience. B2B companies benefit from videos explaining their products to help positively influence the buyer's decision-making process.

Mobile traffic now accounts for more than 54 percent of all web traffic worldwide. This means that if your site isn't mobile friendly, you could lose up to half of all potential customers. According to Google statistics, as page load times increase from 1 second to 10 seconds, the bounce rate of visitors increases by 123 percent. The search giant also points out that, despite the shift to stronger 4G connections, “most mobile sites are still slow and full of too many elements”.

Many sites can boast that the future of web design is completely flat. However, an emerging trend in space is the addition of depth within the images of a site. The speed of the site is an element that is here to stay as a necessity of web design. The average customer needs to be drawn to your site within the first three seconds or else he will get impatient and leave.

Your site can be as beautiful as you want, but if it doesn't load fast enough, then all that effort went to no avail. Users are the ultimate determining factor in determining whether your site is successful or not. A user-centric site must be functional and accessible. Often, designers or website owners are distracted by their own wants and needs instead of focusing on what their customers need from them.

Gloria Foulke
Gloria Foulke

Wannabe twitter lover. Freelance social media maven. Friendly twitter nerd. Hipster-friendly zombie advocate. Avid zombie practitioner. Amateur baconaholic.