How your website is designed, what colors it uses, what fonts and images are present, can mean a whole difference between a successful website and a failure. One of the worst thing a website can have in its design is to be complicated. No one wants to see a complicated website, especially when they first know about the site and visits it.
Your website must have a logo, and that logo is an important part of your brand. Everything below it is what your logo represents. Make sure that everything in your website is designed and work as purposed.
When a visitor visits your site, he/she will scan your site for anything that interests them, in a matter of seconds. The first thing they will search is what made them get there (your links somewhere that points to your website's landing page). After that, he/she will see how the design of the website fits the content, and how it can please the eyes.
A great website design is when it can make visitors feel well at home. If the design has elements that are easy to follow, distinguishable call-to-action, easy to read information, easy to use navigation, and so forth, they will like your website and visit it more often.
Read: Proximity in web design.
Intuitive Navigation
A website's navigation is used to get around your site. A primary navigation is typically a horizontal menu bar placed along the top of the site. Secondary navigation is placed underneath the primary navigation, and can be horizontal or vertical (sidebar).
A proper navigation is important because its menu represents everything your website have as its main offerings. Confusing navigation will result people leaving your site rather than figuring it out. Instead of putting many links that shadows your call-to-action or primary information, just place the necessary things in your primary navigation
Simplicity and Uncluttered
Information in the form of text in a website can be boring. This is where web design comes to the rescue. However, visually overloaded website with too much images, animations and banners can make your visitors' brain stop processing the information they want.
When visitors are confronted with too many options, they will become distracted, and their purpose of visiting your site may change. Distraction is annoyance, and this is one of the main reason people leave a website. To keep them on your site, make sure your website's pages don't have competing call-to-action or visual clutters. Too many graphics and colors can distract the visitors' eyes away from the most important part of your page.
To keep clutters further down, keep paragraphs short, A single paragraph should not have more than five or six lines.
White Space
Simplicity also means giving your visitors a breathing room. Creating enough space between paragraphs and between images can make visitors pleased. White space is creating the breathing room your visitors need when they visit your site.
With enough space between website's elements, visitors can absorb all of your website's features, and what you have to offer.
Controlling white space through layout will keep users focused on the content and control user flow. With a lot of visual competition taking place on the internet, less means more. Controlling white space will improve user experience, increasing returns from the website.
Use Strategic Colors
Use color wisely. Colors are what made things more appealing. Humans are visual creatures, and colors can affect them in many ways. Using neutral colors can help a website feel elegant, clean and modern. Use small key graphic to help guide your visitors to the most important part of the content and your marketing materials.
Colors are meant to make your website less dull. But since each color means something, there is no use to put too many colors on your site. Too many colors translates to too many information. And distracting and annoying your visitors are the last things you need.
Professional Graphics
As before said, humans are attracted to visual appearance. Graphics can boost a website's attractiveness, and can easily degrade it as well when they are not properly implemented. Free clip arts can be appealing, but they can create a sensation of underestimation. Good and professionally made graphics and photos can impress visitors to a whole new level.
Graphics draw the eyes, providing emotional connection to the content. Poor quality graphics, or pictures that have nothing to do with your message are worse than having no graphics at all. If you can't create your own professional graphic masterpiece, you can invest in one.
Proper Fonts
Fonts is what will bring your information to your visitor, this making it one vital part of web design. When choosing the appropriate font, keep in mind that people will be visiting your website from both desktop/laptop and mobile devices. Some large-scaled fonts may read will on a large monitor, but not scale or render will on small mobile screens, losing the desired look and feel. The best way to overcome this problem is to use universal font.
Choose a typeface that can be easily read. And if you're using web fonts, try not to use more than two font families to ensure fast loading pages.
Every Page a Landing Page
Most websites have a design that assumes a user enters through the home page and navigates into the site from there. This is a mistake that you should avoid.
In reality, people can visit your site from anywhere. On the internet, links are shared. And a link that points to your website, can be any link that you have. The majority of visits for most sites begin on a page that is not the home page. Therefore, you need to design the site in such a way that whatever page a visitor lands on, key information is there.
Every landing page you have on your site should enable visitors to engage in conversion. Or at least, ease the step for them to get there.
Mobile Friendly
The use of desktop computers may still be popular in some places, but mobile users are increasing fast. A well-designed website should look good on mobile as it is on desktop. If you do not wish to have a separate site for your mobile version, you can use responsive design that automatically adapts to the screen size.
A better user experience usually translates into more time spent on your site. And the longer your visitor stays on your site, the chance to have higher conversion rates increases.
Less Animation
Animation on websites have already had their golden moment. Despite they are still attractive, they are putting heavy weights to your site, increasing the loading time to a significant amount. If you do want to use animations in your website, use HTML5 instead of Flash.
HTML5 is gaining more support on the web, with search-engine friendly text and the ability to function on many of the popular mobile operating systems without requiring a plugin. The same can't be said for Flash.