When it comes to designing a website, there are so many different directions and styles that you are able to use. It can be anything from vibrant and playful, modern and sleek or even minimalistic and super classy. What you choose to go for at the end of the day, should be something that is reflective of your personal style, identity of your brand, as well as the kind of work you do. All these should always be the ground on which you base what you are anticipating to design. At the end of the day, if you have a great web design, you will end up having something that fully satisfies your functionality and experience as well. Discussed below are some of the tips that you can take note of, on how to design a website of your choice.
Web Design Tips
1.Ensure that the content for the website that you are creating is easily readable
How readable your website is, is basically the ease with which people are able to recognize different sentences, phrases and even words. Whenever your site has a high readability, then several users are then able to skim read through and scan easily without much effort. In this way, one is well able to take in the important information without much struggle.
You can be able to achieve the readability of your website in the following ways:
i)Size of letters
It is more advisable to use fonts that are large in size, as opposed to smaller ones. This is mostly because most people tend to struggle to see the fonts that are smaller. You should, for this reason, at least ensure that you are keeping the body text to a size of at least 16pt. This will be good enough, but at the same time, you should remember that the aforementioned number depends mostly on the fonts that you decide to go for.
ii)Font Type
There is a whole range of fonts to choose from, in the topography of fonts. You are thereby able to choose anything from the serif fonts to the sans serifs. The serif fonts are the ones that have some lines that are projecting at the ends of the letters, such as the Times New Roman font. The sans serifs on the other hand are the ones that do no have lines that are projecting from the ends of the letters.
If at all you are planning to have online texts that are quite lengthy, then you can opt for the sans serif. You can also choose to go for fonts that are interesting, by having pairs that are mixing different font types together. There are also quite a number of logo fonts that can be used to specifically design the logo.
iii)Font number limit
You should totally have a limit to the number of fonts that you use while creating your web design. For this reason, you not use more than three different fonts on a single website. However, there are some specific projects that may call for a number of combinations of different fonts. However, if this is not the case, then you should avoid as much as possible, the use of different typefaces that may make your work look super scattered.
2.Try as much as possible to keep the homepage of your website less scattered and minimalistic
The information on the homepage of your website is supposed to communicate the main message instantly. This is especially because most people are often not even interested in reading all the words on the website. Instead, most people just scan through very quickly, while trying to have the key words picked out. For this reason, you should thus be keen on keeping it short and straight to the point.
The following tips below, will help you greatly, with this tip of trying to be minimalistic:
*Have the important content kept above the fold, so that they are easily accessible.
*Add high quality features such as vector art, beautiful photos and other relevant icons. The use of imagery will help greatly in communicating the point in a straight-forth manner.
*Have your content properly spaced out. This ensures that the content has been given a well-balanced straight to the point feel to it.
3.Have the website designed with the hierarchy of visualization in mind
Hierarchy is a very key component of designing, that helps your content to be displayed in a very effective and clear manner. By using the right hierarchy of content, you will be in a position to lead the users to specific pages that have elements arranged in order of priority. The main components of visual hierarchy are as stated below:
*Size and weight– have the top assets highlighted, such as the business name and the logo, by making them much larger and more prominent visually.
*Placement of elements– the right layout of your website will be able to steer your users to search in the right direction.