Setting up your website includes multiple steps such as registering a domain name, purchasing a reliable web hosting plan, choosing a good content management system, creating content and also designing, purchasing or outsourcing an attractive web design. As important as each of those steps are, particularly that of choosing a good domain name, one of the more important steps is deciding on a good web design for use on your site.

Choosing a good web design isn’t as easy as just choosing, or designing, something that looks good to you, but it needs to be relevant to your websites purpose and those who view your website. There are many aspects of web design that affect the way it relates to a purpose, intrigues visitors and builds a link between those visitors and the original purpose. These include:

• Colour scheme
• Layout and positioning
• Use of media
• Prominence of content
• Choice of font
• Typography

It can be a difficult thing to get right due to the abundance of variables that go into designing a website with specific needs in mind.

First Impressions Count

Studies and grouped analytics show that it takes less than a few seconds, or the blink of an eye, for a visitor to decide on whether they will or won’t remain on the website they have landed on. This makes it extremely important to create a lasting impression through the aesthetics of your website within the shortest time period possible, which is why web design is so important.

The following elements are what you should be aiming to incorporate into your design regardless of whether you are designing your own website, purchasing a pre-made theme or outsourcing the work to a professional.

Quick Load Times
The last thing you want is a website that loads slowly due to an excessive use of images and other forms of media. A slow loading website makes it extremely difficult to give your visitors a reason to stay and with the current state of technology, people have come to expect anything on the internet to load efficiently and quickly.

Colour Coordination
Bright red backgrounds overlayed with yellow text is a big no no! It’s important to compliment your services, products or information with a set of aesthetic colours that are easy on the eyes, look good and draw interest from your visitors. A general rule of thumb is to create a palette that features 3-4 different colours, anything less than that may not be enough, while anything more may be too much. Your chosen colours should compliment each other and provide a relaxed environment that relates to the purpose of your website.

Provide Direction
In a good way, it’s worth treating your visitors as if they have no idea what they are looking for or why they are coming to your website. You need to direct their eyes and attention to a specific section of your page that provides a connection and a reason for them to stay. Think about your website and what you aim to achieve when a visitor lands on your page. Are you selling a product? Promoting a service? Providing informative views? Once you’ve worked this out, ensure that their is a call-to-action that stands out and provides a direct overview of your website or business to the visitor.

Logo Placement
Particularly important for household known brands, it’s good practice to ensure your logo is positioned in a location that is easily visible and noticeable by your visitors to provide them with instant recognition and assists them in their process of making sure they’ve arrived at the correct website.

Accessible Navigation
One of the biggest mistakes often seen in different website designs is the lack of clear navigation or the awkward placement of it. It’s become such a common trend over the years to include a page header that displays a logo on the left hand side of the page with the navigation to the right hand side of this. Theres no need to try and change this, people are used to it and expect your navigation to be there. It’s also of importance to clearly label your navigation buttons or links to correctly match the page they are referring to.

Show That You’re Social
Social media has, and still is, growing in popularity and makes up the majority of mobile internet usage across the world. If you’ve got a facebook, twitter or any other social media profile, be sure to include an icon link to them on your design that is somewhere easily visible. Doing this shows visitors that you have alternate methods of contact whilst also building a connection and trust with them.

Clear Layout
The design in whole needs to employ a layout that provides easy access to the content that visitors need to, or should, find. This should include a header, sub-header, body area and a footer. Your sub-header should be a section located under your main header that holds a page title and breadcrumbs (page hierarchy).

Your Design Needs To Market Your Products

If your website is primarily used for the promotion of your products or services than it needs to be designed in such a way that it naturally assists in the marketing of them or compliments them. This statement may not make the most of sense, but it is something to take into consideration. The colours chosen for your design and the layout in which you’ve decided to go with is the defining factor as to whether it will help to promote your products or not.

As an example:
A company that sells handcrafted timber furniture such as chairs, tables and beds would be better suited to a web design that employs a colour palette featuring whites, cream and light brown colours opposed to a dark green and black colour scheme.

On the other hand, a company that sells Halloween costumes would be better suited to a design that features a black and red colour palette rather than one featuring a light blue and white palette.

Designing Your Website

For those accustomed to web design and development or applications such as Adobe Photoshop, designing your website should be a relatively easy task. Unfortunately, not all of us possess the ability to create a stunning website design on our own, however, there are many alternate ways to get a design that does the job.
Some of these include:

• Hire a web design company
• Host a web design contest on sites such as 99Designs
• Purchase a pre-made theme on a marketplace such as ThemeForest
• Trade your services or product in return for design work

Make Your Web Design Count

If you were able to read through the above list and tick each one off due to your website already meeting each of them, then you’re definitely off to a brilliant start. If some of those were new to you it would definitely be worth taking a look into a way of integrating them into your existing design in order to better improve your website and provide an improved experience for your visitors and potential customers.

Digital Pacific is an Australian provider of cloud hosting solutions, dedicated servers, domain names and virtual private servers.