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Web Design Fundamentals
Your website is the face of your company online, so designing it right is a critical cornerstone of online marketing. Regardless of how good your offerings or brand is, the strength of your web design will ultimately be a major deciding factor in how easily users find your site and whether they want to engage with it.
With that in mind, here are some of the most important best practices and design basics you should be keeping in mind at every stage of your site development:
The Modern Website is Mobile-Ready
Mobile traffic accounts for more than half of the total Internet traffic today, and as such, all modern websites are made with it in mind. Modern web designers use an approach called responsive design to produce webpages that dynamically respond to the size of the user’s device. The result is content that adjusts or re-formats to fit the screen.
What this means for anyone designing or building a website is that mobile readiness needs to be top of mind from the start. The question is not “What if users are on mobile?”, they will be. Testing how your site’s layout, content, and images will translate to screens of all sizes ensures visitors can use the website regardless of the device they access it with. This not only improves user experience (UX) but also can boost your ranking for search engines like Google that prioritize mobile experiences.
Fast Loading Pages, Happy Users
Factors like page load speed and UX have a major impact on your pages’ performance and perception online. No matter the industry, web users are very particular about load times and ease of navigation. A well-organized site that hits the 2-second page load sweet spot will make a user far more likely to stick around and convert. In addition, websites that load quickly across different devices can rank higher in search results than those that don’t.
There’s no shortage of optimizations you can make to create a faster, more navigable site. Keeping site-slowing issues like uncompressed images to a minimum and having a game plan for clear and concise navigation are just a few of the simple optimizations you can incorporate early into the web design process. Responsive sites like the ones mentioned above help with this as well, as they generally load more quickly due to being optimized for more devices.
The Importance of Compliance
Compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) stands out as a best practice because it’s one of the few that actually has a legal obligation to it. But having a compliant website isn’t something companies should do just because it’s necessary. A site that goes above and beyond what’s required has major benefits for site performance.
Compliance-focused features and considerations, such as alt tags on images, closed captioned videos, and colorblind-friendly design keep your site usable for a wider variety of people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to (or even want to) engage with a less accessible site. This makes going the extra mile not only the right thing to do, but also a practice that gives your website a competitive edge.
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