In the competitive world of digital domain, an appealing, usable and elegant looking website is beneficial. It is the foundation of your brand’s online presence and directly impacts consumer trust, user engagement, and sales conversions. A great website design will not only ensure the website stands apart but also helps achieve results over the long term.
What makes a great website design?
- Accessibility
- Color palette
- Images and video
- Functionality
- Navigation
- Typography
Good web design is really a function of these six core elements working together:
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Accessibility
There is the legal and the design side of accessibility. From a design standpoint itself, better accessibility leads to a better overall usability.
For instance, design triggers such as overcrowded layouts and flashing animations can overstimulate many neurodivergent users, leading to visual strain and lower content comprehension for neurotypical users, too. Increasing cognitive ease, and other principles of web accessibility, from the get-go enables you to make more design choices that support user flow through your site by all people.
Shopify also has built-in accessibility features, such as the option to add alt text to images. On both an accessibility and SEO front, one of the lower effort high reward places for you to start is to ensure alt text is included for images on your website. Which means, you can use an accessibility app or hire an accessibility team to check your site and ensure W3C compliance (minimum standards for the best web design) to check the below parameters:
- Animation and movement
- Forms, inputs, and errors
- Processes and task completion
- Image and media alternatives
- Interactive components
- Input/orientation
- Layout
- Consistency across views
- Policy and protection
- Text and wording
- Help and feedback
- User control
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Color palette
The color you choose will shape every other element, as it determines what pops and what fades into the background. Sure this becomes more vital with respects to text where legibility is concerned.
But you don’t have to give up branding in order to ensure legibility. For example, high-contrast color palettes (i.e., black text on a white background) are more legible. But you can press your play on that contrast by going with off-white and charcoal instead of stark black and white.
Indeed, even within a color, say off-white, you can set your own brand, since some off-whites skew grayer, bluer and others warmer, creamier. Choose the colors you use for your brand, which should remain consistent across your site and other places where users may come in contact with your brand.
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Images and video
Even if your brand’s color palette is minimal, you can always introduce color through photography, video, and other visual assets. Most particularly study go up by adding branded photos – this can liven up your website by adding some color to the mix and bringing your brand personality to life. That’s also something you can change from season to season to alter the visual feel of your site.
When it comes to product photography, it’s best to develop a standardized aesthetic, so that site visitors can flow seamlessly through the site and have a unified view of your product catalog. So for example, shoot all of your products on the same slightly off-white background, with the same seeming quality of natural lighting.
With lifestyle photography and videography, there’s so much more room to strengthen your brand’s narrative. Jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche’s site has a video and photos of the brand’s ambassadors and celebrity couple Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo, for instance.
An industry icon can be great social proof to foster brand trust. The images of Adam and Behati affectionately embracing while draped with the brand’s jewelry cast Jacquie Aiche jewelry as daring and romantic.
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Functionality
Above all else, a website needs to fulfill its goal, be it selling products or delivering information. It also means that as important as your site looking good, is how good it works. To inform those efforts, every time you add a design element, measure how it affects site speed.
So for example, if you decide to embed videos, add an image fallback. So, for instance, if someone’s connection isn’t stable and video takes time to load, the fallback image will immediately jump into place in place of the video.
Even though you’re designing your website on a laptop or desktop computer, your customers are visiting your site on a range of devices — from mobile phones to tablets. In fact, over half of all ecommerce sales are made by mobile commerce. For this reason, many proprietors favor responsive design which means the site will organically adjust based on the users device. That will further optimise their experience for the high percentage of your audience who are mobile shoppers.
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Navigation
What is navigation design Navigation design is about how to create a funnel for the person to go into as few clicks as possible to find what they are looking for. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this design element; there are consented patterns for intuitive website navigation.
An example would be keeping navigation links, logo, and any tools like search, user registration, the shopping cart on the left-hand side, centre, and upper right-hand side respectively.
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Typography
Good typography leads a reader’s eyes through the text like butter. For instance, using larger text to draw attention to key information or ideas will improve understanding by establishing a visual hierarchy.
SURF THROUGH CHOICES: Your choices of these design elements can improve your brand visual identity. In typography, typeface is the design, while font is an implementation of the design. Arial bold, Arial italic and Arial regular are all different fonts in the Arial typeface. When designing your visual identity, it’s beneficial to select one to two complementary typefaces that are used consistently across your branding. A lot of the shopify built-in typefaces are very nice and easy to choose when you’re starting up a theme on Shopify.
Basic Commercial Light is another example, and a much easier-to-read option than a more generic standard Arial or Helvetica, popular in the luxury Shopify space for brands like The Row.
Source: Basic Commercial
You can also pay to license premium typefaces from independent foundries. Both Klim and Commercial make excellent choices for timeless branding and design. And some foundries release typefaces that feel hyper-relevant and a little more experimental, like Schick Toikka and Pangram Pangram.
Every single font has its own backstory and inspiration; the slight nuances in the letterforms are what provide your brand with an unmistakable and identifiable voice and tone.
Essential website design tips
- Mix the known with the unknown
- Use Font Applications as a Guide
- Pare down
- Pay attention to line length
- Avoid pure white
- Prepare for the worst possible browsing experience
Every site is unique, but there are some broad strokes that will always apply when designing a site:
Equilibrium the anticipated alongside the unanticipated
We humans are great at recognizing patterns. It’s one of the reasons why websites that feel intuitively usable tend to have strong underlying patterns that repeat throughout the design.
What we refer to as web design best practices are truly conventions we keep repeating until users expect them. for instance, we expect to see the word “bag” or “cart” or an icon which represent one of those in the uppermost right corner of an ecommerce website. Users typically don’t actively register these patterns, but will register the lack of them.
The more best practices a website follows—like the navigation on the left, a shopping cart in the top right, product descriptions to the right of product images—the easier (in theory) a site will be to navigate for a new user.
But that approach does definitely have a shadow side: the “sea of sameness.” That’s what you get when websites seem overly optimized, without personality. This is also why elements like typography, imagery, and color are important—these things let you create a strongly branded experience on your site, one that still feels fairly intuitive to navigate.
Select fonts according to their usage
The most common trap that people fall into when selecting typography is choosing a font that isn’t suited for the exact type of copy you’re putting in front of website visitors.
For instance, the “buy now” call-to-action button or product description needs to be instantly readable and easily perceptible with respect to its size and weight and also legible in line length. If a font is far too difficult for a reader’s eye, that’s tiring, and they may leave the site without taking action.
With large display headlines, however, there is more creative freedom. If you have a hero or banner image that fills the page (Analogue’s cover image uses the words “new arrivals” across it), that’s going to be really big so you can add a bit more flourish and decoration while keeping it legible.
Pare down
The less-is-more approach can often lead to a much stronger site experience. Pick one typeface for your product packaging and your website, like the skin-care brand Klur did. As a rule of thumb, don’t exceed two brand fonts (maybe three as an accent) or you risk overwhelming your site visitors or missing out on branding opportunities.
Klarsfeld, for example, chose a sans serif and monospaced combination. The site’s header and menu items are monospaced, which we chose to emphasize the category of items, while the product names and descriptions are sans serif for legibility. An added level of distinction is line weights.
Even your brand colors will have a greater impact the fewer there are. You need enough colors to make the website contrast (at least two) but not too much to be confusing.
Pay attention to line length
Line length is an important consideration when creating the underlying grid of your website if your website has many blocks of text such as in product descriptions.
If you have one line that goes to the end of the page, your eyes are traveling from the left side of the screen to the right and back to the left again. It can be very tiring.
That’s why a common best practice for product description pages is to have the image take up the left half of the page and the text the right half—that way the eyes of the user have to travel only half the width of the page.
Avoid pure white
There is pure white, for example, which can be really hard on the eye on backlit screens and blue light-emitting devices.
Avoid Full Black Go with palettes that are slightly off white and slightly dark charcoal, rather than full high-contrast black. It’s something so slight that the user may not even be able to verbalize when they reach a site. But it makes a website feel more thought-through, and it can change the overall accessibility of the site.
Design for the worst this browsing experience would be
As you build and test a website, you probably have ideal conditions with perfect Wi-Fi, but you want your users to find what they are looking for everywhere.
Envision the users are purchasing using their telephones on a flight with spotty in-air Wi-Fi and each time they load another web page be in line for a dropped site or truly long stacking times. If a design element wouldn’t function in those situations, you must have a contingency. Follow best practices on site speed optimization, such as disabling mobile video autoplay and asynchronous loading to prioritize critical content.
Conclusion
Exceptional website design transcends aesthetics to deliver a seamless, engaging user experience that drives conversions. By integrating accessibility, functionality, and innovative branding elements, your website can become a powerful tool for sustainable growth. Prioritize user-centric design principles and iterative optimization to ensure lasting success.
Website Design Tips FAQ
How to make good websites?
A professional website that is good is immersive and experiential, and it presents the brand marked in a unique way. But the design probably also demonstrates restraint, because ultimately, it has to work. Responsive design is critical because so many users are browsing on mobile devices. If designing a website is not among your skills, you may collaborate with credible web designers or select a high-quality template.
Why is web design difficult?
Web design is a balancing act of competing priorities. Even if you prioritise functionality, you will never create a website that is boring and generic. However, you may have created a design that is beautiful to the eye, yet not practical when it comes to your website visitor.
How can I use color to enhance my website design?
High-contrast color combinations are helpful for navigation, buttons, and other critical text in your website design. Choose an off-white rather than pure white for backgrounds to give your users’ eyes a break. Think also about infusing pops of bold color through visual elements such as lifestyle photography and product packaging.
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