When it is about creating websites, either for yourself or your clients, success will not come easy. To increase productivity and to keep your outputs look fresh and contemporary, and to have them optimized for higher search engine ranks and higher conversion rates, it is imperative that you are always learning new tips and fresh techniques all the time. In this article, you will learn such tips which will help you to design better your web pages.
1. Use of style guides
Style guides are quite popular in the world of publishing. They can be either as large books or small documents which media publications use to retain uniform styles all the way through their content. This can go on to include everything like how states, countries are placed to even how numbers are represented. Web designers create their style guides ensuring the sites which they build have continuously uniform styles all over. This is in particular valuable for designers collaborating with freelancers. An excellent style guide will help keep an incongruent team on equal footing.
Google style guide for its Material Design can be an excellent example of a methodical, efficient style guide. You must know about the best contemporary style guides today before you design your website or have a website designed for your business.
2. Phase out the sidebars
Sidebars will create clutter. They were intended to develop the usability of websites by showing and displaying supplementary navigational elements, like links to recent posts or popular content. But over the years, it is fair to conclude that they have been taken over by smart marketers who are looking for a way to advertise email option forms and some other promotional contents which does not contribute much to a healthy user experience. While theoretically, sidebars which contain links or other helpful content should improve the user’s experience, but in reality, only a few website visitors will, in fact, use them, according to various heat map tests conducted by various agencies over the years. Thus, you must not compromise the design of your website by incorporating sidebars for marketing as might not give you any desirable results in the long run.
Try to phase out sidebars within your designs, in particular, if your site does not require one. Make the content of your website the main essential element of your page by having designs which will force readers and visitors to focus more on it. If you are apprehensive of eliminating sidebars then use themes which will give you a chance to publishing content that is full-width along with more conventional layouts which will feature a sidebar.
You can also contact the experts of Joel House Search Media to learn more about smart techniques to help you in your web design.
3. Start your design in the off-screen mode
If you create codes and make designs on screen at a quick rate, without caring how things might turn out because you know that you will be able to edit and clear things up at a later time, then you should try taking on a different approach once. You can turn to the old pencil and blank paper to plan and design an overall structural layout for your website off-screen first. You can use this idea to decide where you would like specific elements of your site to go, kind of like how an architect will first use floor plans to decide where he will put the doors and windows and the rooms.
4. Use bigger font sizes
Big font sizes are not a new development or feature of the design, but it is still a popular practice to pursue in today’s world. The reason for this is that it can be instrumental in capturing the reader’s notice and will place the focus over to your content. Readability on small screens, like tablets or mobile phones, has been instrumental in the increasing popularity of this trend, but it again can fit nicely with conventional minimalist and smooth design trends. Incorporate large fonts in your web designs, like a minimum 18 font size for the body text, if it seems appropriate. Use a typeface that is web-friendly, which will not create any scaling problems.
5. Generate more space
Too much of clutter can be distracting for readers and can make your site seem excessively complicated. This is why you should try phasing out your sidebars on your website. But, you must also ensure that there is more space rather than including too many elements on your page. It will help the reader to focus more on what is essential while giving you the chance to make better-looking web designs.
Conclusion
Web designs are a tricky matter because they can either do your business or ruin it because your customer’s perception about your company will be based on the web design. So, you must ensure that it is okay to look at, functional, simple and clutter-free.
