7 Website Design Elements: A Comprehensive Guide

When designing your website, your audience and customers should be at the forefront of your mind. You need to ensure that your website is secure and trustworthy, so that customers feel comfortable making purchases. According to the 7C (200) by Rayport and Jaworski, the seven design elements of a customer interface are context, content, community, personalization, communication, connection and commerce. Context refers to the design and layout of the website.

Content includes text, images, sound and video that web pages contain. Community is the ways in which sites allow communication between users. Customization is the ability of the site to adapt to different users or allow users customize site. Communication is the ways in which the sites allow the recommendation of the site to the user or two-way communication.

Connection is the grade site is linked to other sites. Lastly, commerce is the site's capabilities to allow commercial transactions. To ensure that the website is visited consistently, companies should also focus on constantly changing their site. They need to add new features, new products and new pages, keeping customers up to date on the latest products and company news. 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. 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. 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 responsive design.

Many sites can boast that web design is completely flat. However, an emerging trend in space is the addition of depth within images of a site. With a range of variety in both design and color to suit all ages and all genders, your customization has been fulfilled. As new technologies are often too complex for their target audience, interaction design aims to minimize learning curve and increase accuracy and efficiency of a task without diminishing utility. Create an explanation of your website that includes all design elements that drive customer experience.

It is important that web designers know keys to making website work in all major browsers, use meta tags, alt tags, are fully versed in SEO (search engine optimization).For any website intended for sales and commerce, 7 C's of design element should be considered to drive traffic to website, attract target market, create lasting experience for people to visit site again (Novak). Thoughtful web content and text will do more than anything else to make website design attractive, effective and popular. Scrollable text, animation, flash intros should be used sparingly in web design only to emphasize point and achieve maximum effect. Optimizing site design for search engines includes proper structure of permalinks - way to format links to each page with slugs that contain words that highlight content of page.

To conclude, L'Oreal Paris website is designed taking into account 7 C's of design elements and scores well on almost all criteria. Best feature of design is that users can find everything on first page they see such as men, women, children etc. When creating your website it's important to keep it user-friendly and keep in mind 7 C's that will enhance its design element and attract customer traffic. A well-executed design will take all this into consideration from user's perspective.

Gloria Foulke
Gloria Foulke

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