Few Principles of Effective Website Designing

The website usability that determines the success or failure of a website design. Since the web visitor is the very person who is going to do the clicks and thus pertains much importance in the eyes of the businesses, user centric website design has taken to the first row position when it comes to inculcating important elements in a web design, for profitability.

In this article today, I am not going to discuss the implementation details such as the placement of the search box and all, but the main principles, and approaches for effective web design.

Effective web design principles

In order to effectively use the principles, we must first need to understand how do a web user think and interact with websites.

How a web user think?

Basically, the way a user acts at a website is similar to the way of his acting when at a store. Visitor land on a website and they put in a glancing gaze at about everything. They only happen to stay when they find something that interests them. If they don’t, they will simply move on.

What do users appreciate?

Users basically look for information. they don’t really care how is it coming to them. Through the content or through the visuals. This is the very reason behind the success of websites that offer users a chance to acquire relevant information through lots of content and in such cases users are ready to compromise a little on the quality of the overall website design.

How do users analyze?

When a user lands on a webpage, he instantly looks for some anchor points which would guide him through the content of the page. the process starts with scanning. Even wandered why do we have highlighted text and fancy fonts lying in the middle of many web pages. These are the anchor points that help users to build attraction and relate to the topic. The engagement begins here onwards.

When do users leave?

When the website fails to deliver what the user is looking for, both in terms of design and content, is the time when the user intends to navigate away.

Don’t make them think

Any website design that is created keeping the users’ engagement in mind should be as obvious and self-explanatory as possible. If the navigation and site architecture is not intuitive, the number of questions in the user’s mind will increase and it will get hard for him to comprehend how the system works, thus agitation will buildup in his mind and induces him to leave.

Work to build up attention

A website provides a mix of both static and dynamic content to the user. However, there are certain elements that attract more attention that others do. Images are of them. Eye catching, interactive images work wonders when we use them to build up visitor’s focus on any one web element.

The human eye is a highly non-linear device, and web-users can instantly recognize edges, patterns and motions. This is why video-based advertisements are extremely annoying and distracting, but from the marketing perspective they perfectly do the job of capturing users’ attention.

Expose the core features

Modern web designs are usually criticized by their approach of guiding users by steps along with large buttons or visual effects. But if we see them from the design perspective, these elements are all but bad. Such step by step guidelines for fulfilling any task are extremely important as they lead the visitor the business owner wants them to be led in a user friendly way.

Letting the users know what functions are available is among the primary principles to a successful user interface design. And as long as its achieved, it doesn’t really matter how it’s done. It’s the end result that matters the most.

Keep it simple, silly.

The keep it simple, silly (KISS) principle should be the primary goal of every business owner who chooses to get a website designed for his/her business. although the website design is important, however it’s just works as an eye candy for the entire experience. In most cases, the web visitor is looking for information than the design only, and it is the design that compliments the information transmittal process. A user friendly content rich website that is well designed serve the purpose exactly right.

Conclusion

So these are the few effective web design principles which I think should be included in any website design if the main aim is to please the web visitors and induce them to make a sale or fill a lead. Please do note that these principles are the important ones but not the only ones to be followed. There is a long list of them, where including all of them will make the post very lengthy and less interesting. I will come up with similar posts soon that will enlighten you upon factors that can help you in creating beautiful yet performing website designs.