Refining Your Website: What Makes a Website Design Great?

A well-planned and engaging website design instantly makes a positive impression, increases engagement, and improves the overall user experience. However, developing a great design for your website can be quite challenging, especially if you just starting out. To make your design stand out, you first need to understand what makes a great website design.

Elements of a Great Website Design

The design of your website is a crucial part of the first impression visitors get and defines how they will interact with your content. It’s no coincidence that most businesses hire professional web designers to make their website stand out from the competition and lure in more visitors.

However, if you decide to take on the challenge yourself and create your own website using website builders, here are a few best web design practices to keep in mind when starting on the design.

Engaging Color Schemes

Colors capture the visitors’ attention by creating a visual interest and conveying emotion. By familiarizing yourself with the basic rules and ideas of color theory, you learn to establish an engaging color scheme that aligns with the content on your website. Online palette generators can help you speed up the process.

Web-Safe Fonts

There is a reason why you always see the same three fonts on every website you visit and it’s not lacking creativity on the developer’s part. A poor font choice not only makes the design less attractive, but can also negatively affect the sites’ accessibility and impact user experience. That’s why its only smart to stick with web-safe fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial or Helvetica to make sure the typography of your website is compatible with multiple web browsers and mobile devices.

To make the text more visually impactful and improve readability, you should focus on choosing appropriate font sizes and proper spacing.

Clear Visual Hierarchy

By arranging all elements of your website strategically, you make it easier for visitors to identify and navigate significant parts of the site. You can establish a visual hierarchy in numerous ways, such as using color, contrast, and proportion to emphasize important elements or creating an organized layout with whitespaces and grids.

Web Accessibility

It is essential to familiarize yourself with website accessibility, not only to improve user experience and for aiding inclusivity, but also to make sure you’re meeting legal requirements. To make your website more accessible, you can try the following strategies:

providing alt text and tags for images to help people with visual impairment understand what it is about
creating a logical heading structure and making sure everything is tagged appropriately, so that users relying on assistive technology (i.e. screen readers) can understand page structure and intent
adding captions for audio and video content to make it accessible to hard-of-hearing and deaf individuals
performing accessibility testing during development with the help of online accessibility evaluation tools to check if your website complies with the applicable regulations

Responsive Design

A responsive website design allows your website to adjust and optimize its layout for the device it is viewed on. This way you can make sure that your website functions properly and looks great, no matter if the visitor is using a phone, laptop, or tablet.

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