5 Key Principles of Effective Web Design

Web design is critical for conversions and your brand’s overall image. After all, searchers aren’t going to take the desired actions and stay connected with your business online if you don’t present a site designed with their needs and expectations in mind. Effective website design is all about the decisions you make as you put together your various webpages. To point you in the right direction, the experts at Saba SEO, a premier web design company in San Diego, offer these five principles of smart web design to consider.

1. Keep It Simple and Clean

There’s such a thing is overdesigning a website. If you overload your website with too many features and elements, you could overwhelm visitors. Instead, opt for a design that’s simple, clear, and focused. An “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to web design could also:

• Slow page load times
• Confuse visitors
• Obscure the purpose of your site

Also avoid overdoing it with colors. The same advice applies to the number of images and videos you put on each page.

2. Maintain Consistency

From your preferred color scheme to the fonts you use for headlines and text, maintain consistency in your approach to web design. Cascading style sheets (CSS) can help you achieve this goal as you plan the formats and layouts of your webpages. In fact, once your style is defined with a CSS, it can be applied to any page that references that file.

3. Make It Readable

Even though you want to make your site crawlable, it’s still meant to be viewed by real people. For this reason, you should optimize readability with your design. Fortunately, your site can be visually appealing and readable with:

• Easy-to-read fonts such as Arial and Helvetica
• Short, descriptive headlines
• Bullet lists where it’s appropriate to use them
• Spacing between paragraphs
• Short paragraphs so you’re not creating “text mountains”

4. Consider Mobile Users

Since around 2015, mobile has been more popular than desktop. Google even has a preference for evaluating how sites look from a mobile viewpoint for ranking purposes (“mobile first”). Your approach to web design should keep smaller screens in mind. If you also want to keep desktop viewers happy, consider a responsive approach to web design. With the use of flexible grids, flexible images, and similar techniques, you can produce a site that conforms to whatever screen it’s being viewed on.

5. Make Navigation Easy

There’s research showing visitors are more likely to stick around when they get to a website if the navigation is easy. This isn’t shocking news, but it’s a reminder to keep navigation in mind as you design your site. A good rule of thumb is the “three-click rule”—make it possible for visitors to get where they want to go on your site in no more than three clicks.

These key principles of smart website design can increase the odds that your website effectively represents your business. For advice on any aspect of Internet marketing, from web design to SEO, businesses count on Saba SEO, an industry leader among San Diego marketing companies, for the highest levels of expertise and professionalism. Call us today at 858-277-1717 to speak with one of our friendly representatives.