When developing a web experience for your business online, it can be quite easy to get lost in all the UI/UX & technical information involving site performance and optimisation. That’s all before you’ve even thought about SEO, social media, marketing and ranking your website! It is important to focus on best web design practices first, to set the strong foundation for everything to follow!
Not to worry, There are some basic web design practices you can follow to set your website up on the right track. I’ve broken down the top 4 web so you can get started in the right direction.
1. Consistent Branding On and Off the Web
My personal web design practices is to keep any brand consistent throughout, whether it be B2C, B2B or just for personal use. In business terms, your brand identity, colours, typography, iconography and imagery need to be just as consistent through your website as they are on your branded vehicles.
Your design needs to be linear, don’t be afraid to re-use sections or layouts on previous pages as this helps you keep your website on brand, keep your website as human as possible. Keeping your H tags and other typography stylings is also essential in conveying a tidy consistent design & the same must be applied to your imagery, colours and icons.
2. Site Loading Speeds
The loading speed of your website is crucial. If your web pages don’t load within three seconds you will lose nearly half your visitors (around 40%).
If you’re a business this will affect your sales records and revenue. To avoid this there are multiple things you can do to bring your site speed down. The ideal speed is anything under 2 seconds and here are a few basic web design practices you can do to achieve this:
Optimise your code and enable compression
Compressing your resources and code files can reduce the bytes a page sends over the network you are using, thus making your load speeds quicker. Please remember your code will need to be optimised for compression and consistency will need to be carried across all your HTML & CSS files.
Change your image format or optimise your image files
The overuse of large images on a website can really affect the load performance. If your web page has 20 1MB files this will drastically decrease your load speed as the image resolution is too high for browsers to load quickly.
Review Plugins
Sometimes websites can be bogged down with unnecessary plugins that don’t actually serve a purpose. Going through your plugins folder and auditing it will help you root out and remove any unwanted plugins slowing your site loading speed down.
3. Responsive on all screen sizes
Having a website that looks incredible on a desktop is all well and good, but how does it hold up on mobile? On tablet? You may think that a cluttered web design on mobile isn’t a massive issue, but with mobile internet usage rising more and more every year, the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to ensure your website maintains its design integrity on tablet and mobile as well.
Most searches for paid services are completed via mobile internet access these days. So ensuring your mobile experience is as clean, crisp and straightforward as your desktop experience has never been more apparent.
4. CTA’s That are Big, Bold & Beautiful
Most business websites have an end game, the main goal, which is usually trying to get the users to buy a product, contact for a service, sign up for a newsletter etc…
Call to action (CTA’s) are usually links to get the user to action whatever it is you’re trying to get them to action. So, whether this is buying a product or getting in touch, the placement, design and use of these links is essential & needs to stand out.
UX web design practices are essentially a deeper meaning for how you get users to action what you want them to on your site. I mean the roll itself can go so much deeper in terms of research and marketing data analysis but in its rawest form, it is working out how quickly you can get your user from A to B without losing interest.
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