Web Design Principles Everyone Designer Should Know - Finepoint Design
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Web design plays a very important role in the success of your business. Once people come to your website, they will see its design. Now, your design can leave either a bad or good impression on your site’s visitors.

It’s important to note that a website with a good design has a high conversion rate. Design influences the decisions of the site’s users. If site visitors like your design, then they will go to other its pages and get familiar with your products or services. Visitors may become your customers and decide to make purchases in the future. On the other hand, visitors will leave your website quickly if you have a poor design.

It all depends on the first impression that your website design makes on visitors. As a site owner, you obviously should aim to impress users with your website design.

Website design has an impact on your search engine rankings as well. A site’s SEO depends a lot on user experience these days. The reality is, Google and other search engines analyze the behavior of the site’s users carefully.

If you provide a great user experience, then your site’s web pages will rank high in search engines for keywords that you target. However, bad website design has a negative impact on your website’s ranking.

The truth is, website design goes hand in hand with marketing. It’s crucial to design a website with your brand in mind. When designing a website, it’s necessary to show the personality of your brand to potential customers. Moreover, you should aim to represent your brand in the best possible way.

HERE’S HOW TO GET FAMILIAR WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF GOOD WEB DESIGN.

1) VISUAL HIERARCHY

When designing a website, it’s incredibly important to arrange elements in the right way. The process of arranging website design elements is known as visual hierarchy.

Each element of website design has its own size and color. You need to find out what design elements get the most site visitors’ attention. Next, you need to place design elements logically on a web page.

Clearly, you need to make the most important design elements more visible on a website. Traditionally, site visitors see large design elements first. That’s why you should place them in the most important areas of a website. This will allow you to draw the attention of users to the most important things.

2) HICK’S LAW

Oftentimes, users can’t understand the main goal of a website because they have a lot of choices. That’s the reason why making a decision can be hard. It takes more time to explore all options available and make a choice. So, the user’s reaction time increases significantly.

Hick’s law has become an effective solution to such a problem. Hick’s law is about minimizing the choices of users on a website. By doing so, you will be able to turn more site visitors into customers.

According to Hick’s law, you should remove all unnecessary things and provide users with the most important options. If site visitors have fewer options, they will find it easy to make a decision.

3) FITTS LAWS

It takes site visitors some time to reach the most important areas on a website. The so-called Fitts Law is all about calculating this amount of time and reducing it.

It’s incredibly important to create a web design with this aspect in mind. You should aim to design a website in a way that allows site users to find the most important elements easily and quickly. Make the most important elements easy to reach.

When designing a website, you should also take into account the fact that users browse pages on different types of devices such as desktops, phones and tablets. Make sure that design elements will look great on screens of all sizes.

4) LAW OF PRÄGNANZ

The success of website design depends a lot on how site’s users visually perceive various elements on web pages. It would be great to sort all design elements by groups and place them logically on a website.

The law of Prägnanz encourages designers to create simple structures and avoid complex shapes. Using simple structures and elements allows site visitors to perceive the most important things in the design easily and quickly.

The elements of design shouldn’t be thrown chaotically on a web page. When designing a website, you have to divide web pages into sections. The design has to contain a section for each group of elements. Each section has to contain elements that are relevant to it.

5) LAW OF PROXIMITY

It’s important to design a website in a way that allows users to understand the information available on web pages easily and quickly.

Cognitive overload is a big problem for users. You should aim to create a design that reduces cognitive overload and allows users to see all things clearly.

The so-called law of proximity allows designers to solve this problem effectively. The law encourages web designers to sort design elements and divide them into relevant groups. Elements of a group have to be located close to each other.

You can create groups for headers, menu links, and other types of design elements. Take advantage of spacing to separate groups of design elements on a web page.

6) LAW OF SIMILARITY

You can also improve your design by applying the law of similarity. It is also known as the principle of association in web design.

If you use this principle, you’ll make it easy for site users to perceive similar design elements even if they are separated and there is much space between them.

Visitors will quickly see the items that have something in common. Design elements are divided into groups. Each group consists of design elements that have similar color, shape, size, style, etc.

When a person sees some elements in website design, he/she usually tries to find similar things. Web designers use similar objects to draw visitors’ attention to the most important design elements.

7) OCCAM’S RAZOR

It’s another principle that you can use to make the design of your website easy to understand. Users may find it difficult to see the most important elements on a website if you overload them.

Occam’s Razor is all about applying the minimalist style for less important elements in website design. The reality is, people tend to pay attention to larger elements first. That means that you can either hide or minimize the information that’s less important.

It’s not a good idea to remove less important elements from a website. Some site visitors still may need them. If you take advantage of the minimalism you’ll make content available only for those people, who are interested in it.

8) MILLER’S LAW

Miller’s law is often used in web design. This principle allows designers to structure the content on a web page properly. According to Miller’s law, a person’s memory can keep only 5 – 10 pieces of content.

The site’s design elements shouldn’t be displayed in one block. Visitors will not be able to see them all at once. That’s the reason why it’s necessary to divide the design of a website into separate blocks. Don’t put too many elements in each block!

The web design process always has to begin with meticulous planning. You should decide how many design elements you would like to show and what type of content each site’s block has to contain.          

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading this article. In fact, there are many things that you should keep in mind during the web design process. Clearly, you should aim to create a great-looking and convenient business site that converts well.

It’s fair to say that web design is an art. However, you’ll be able to run your business successfully if you master the art of web design. You have to create a design that will provide site visitors with a great user experience and allow you to accomplish your business goals.

It goes without saying that effective web design contributes greatly to the success of any business. A good web design turns visitors into customers. If your web design is great, people will come back to your business site again and again. Potential customers will remember your brand and one day they will buy your products.

We’ve just provided you with the key web design principles that you need to follow to create a user-friendly site that works for your business. And of course, it would be better for you to implement these principles into the web design process.

Best of luck!