What Determines Effective Webpage Design?
The elements of effective design
If you thought that webpage design was simply about adding words and images to your webpages, you would be wrong. While design includes both of these aspects, it is impossible to create an effective website without good design that incorporates strategy, structure, visual impact, usability and most importantly, conversion elements.
Think about the last website you visited. Perhaps you were searching for a product to purchase online, or researching that restaurant you have been meaning to try. What was the first thing that you noticed on the website? Did you know how to find the information you needed, or were you lost on the homepage with no idea where to find the page you wanted? Did you feel like the website reflected the company, or can you even remember what it looks like now?
Webpage Design – It’s All About the User
All of these thoughts are done in just a few seconds – the first seconds as you arrive on the page. To be effective, webpage design needs to help users achieve their goals: find information, contact the company, get a quote or buy a product. In addition to this, the page should also look as great as it functions. After all, who bothers to stay on a webpage if all they see is blank spaces and pixelated images? In today’s online era, web users are a lot more demanding – they want to go to a webpage, find what they need and get back to their busy lives.
Factors that separate effective webpage design from bad design include the following:
- Goals – what do you want your web users to do on your page? Is it an information page, does it have a contact form? Can they download resources? Can they sign up for a newsletter? Are they purchasing products? Your goal needs to be clear, and the design should follow, making it easy for users to perform the action you want them to take.
- Navigation – landing on a webpage rather than the homepage means that the user will need to find their way to home and other pages easily. Don’t make them look for your menus – they may give up and leave your site altogether. Make menus visible, and add more than one set of menus to make it as easy as possible to navigate. Use submenus that are logical and clear. Think like a web user and help them find your information easily.
- Structure – this is the overall layout of your webpage design. Busy pages that have large blocks of content with very little images are hard to read. Structured pages that have a mixture of content, text, calls to action and even multimedia elements draw the eye to key information, especially if they are not cluttered together. White space is the designer’s worst enemy however – good structure in webpage design balances everything out.
- Impact – finally, good webpage design should also have impact. This doesn’t mean entire Flash sites that are slow to load, or cheesy animation that appeals only to a small segment of your target audience. You can skip that walking, talking page guide too, and the video or sound effects that automatically play when someone arrives on the page. Use clear images, use colour smartly, use a font that is easy to read. Use plenty of headers to break up the content, and above all, always think from the user’s perspective. Is this a webpage that you would happily visit or share?
If you have answered yes, and you have incorporated all the basics and done ample testing to ensure that everything is working as it should, you will have an effective webpage design.