When visitors visit your site, they can create the feelings about your website and your organization. This feeling can be either positive or negative, and it's entirely up to you and should never be overlooked when designing your website.
A great web design is how you can deliver your content is such a way that it makes everything interestingly look good.
So what really defines "great" in web design?
There has been a body of knowledge created to help designers effective develop visuals that play into the psychology of their viewers. In order to achieve this, one must understand how different web design elements and how each of them can affect mood, attitude and experience.
The three main things that affect your readership, are the content, space and colors
Content
Visitors come to a website to access information they need, and web design is what helps them in finding the information they need quickly and easily.
Back in the early days of the web, websites were usually plain and had colorful elements. Their pages were often cramped with thousands and thousands of words. That is a lot if compared to when the internet matures, when contents at a single page only have about 1,000 to 2,000 words in average.
With pages having a lot of words, it was difficult for people to find the content they wanted. The attempt to read the whole page to just get to what they want, often invoked stress, anxiety and overall unpleasant feelings for visitors.
In modern web design, contents should be more organized, edited and designed so that pages can be a great medium in which information can be adequate, but at the same time not overwhelming.
To do this, contents should be straightforward. Adding a bit of graphics, images or videos can spice up the dull (but overwhelming) feeling people used to see back in the early days of the internet.
The next thing, is to make the content to represent the tones of your brand or company.
So here is where you need to put information people need the most, in the most logical place. Never hide important information when it comes to delivering contents as this will surely make visitors unhappy.
Remember that contents delivered in a simple, clean, organized, easy to read, concise and a professional manner will always have the advantages if compared to those that don't.
Space
Everyone needs some space, and so does your website.
White space, or just space, is a way you can organize your content that will dramatically affect how your visitors feel. While organizing contents should be your first priority, space should be considered to make those contents stand out.
The sensation of emptiness in space or white space, is where no contents or visual elements demanding attention is present. This space plays an important role in any type of design work, not just web design. The reason for this is because emptiness gives the resting place feeling to viewers.
If no white space is present, there is nothing for them to move their eyes to take a visual break.
In web design, these resting places are one of the concepts of minimalism. They should be found between margins, around elements such as images, around buttons, etc..
What's more, a proper placement of white space can visually cue visitors towards something that should matter to them (or to you). For example, the call-to-action button. This is where you should never make things more complicated than they should be.
Color
Colors attract the eyes much more than anything else, besides shapes.
When designing a website, you should know what color combination is best to represent your brand. Colors are often dictated as the visual identity, but what you need to know is that colors should also be used to affect people (prioritizing your visitors' gender is one of the options).
In web design, colors should play a role of not just becoming an aesthetic visuals, it should also make visitors pleased by having them around. They should compel your contents, in a way that focus won't be diverted, but escalated to the points of interest.
Most visual identities in web design have neutral colors (i.e the tints, shades, and hues) that are used along with their main colors. In most modern web designs, these neutral colors often take dominance in terms of how much real estate they are taking up.
Remember that neutral colors like black, white and gray should be properly used to make contents prominent. Other colors that are catchy to the eyes, like for example, red, blue, yellow and green, can be used on other visual elements to create the sense of completeness.
Color plays an important part in human psychology. Cooler colors (blues, greens, purples) often provide an inviting, professional and relaxed feeling. In contrast, it can be used to give a very cold and unfriendly feelings. Warmer colors (yellows, oranges, reds) are warm, soothing, and can give the sensation of creativity. But it can also give the negative feelings such as anger and stress.
Play with colors, and see what suits your website best.
Neutral colors can act as white space when placed properly. And this can be useful to reduce the negative effects of colors. For example, they can be used to divert attention to call-to-action buttons or links. The reason for this is simple: a big red button hovering on a yellow background will hurt people's eyes, for example. But if that big red button is placed on top of a lighter shade of yellow or just plain white, that button becomes more interesting to be clicked on.