Sawaram Suthar / 5 Mins Read
Updated: March 17, 2023
Your website is the central hub from which you provide information about your business, products or services. Learn the Web design principles you need to learn to generate profits by increasing sales revenue and acquiring more customers.
You don't often see the terms web design and sales being used together. What could they possibly have in common? We'd say everything.
Believe it or not, web designing entails more than choosing the right background for your website, making it 'look good', or swearing to never use the typeface 'Comic Sans' again.
An impactful and impressive web design delivers a seamless user experience with defining elements such as shape, font, text, line, and color. It serves as its backbone to ultimately connect with the user.
It uses design to deliver what your customers think and amplify how they feel when they visit your website. It convinces - and motivates - them to convert. This blog will look at the top-6 strategies that come together to form the cardinal rule of successful web designing. Let's jump right in.
Top-6 Web Design Principles That Can Transform Your Website into a Sales-Churning Machine
Designing your website doesn't need to be an expensive or painful affair. Luckily, there are user-friendly and flexible 'make your own website' platforms that offer a 'free reign' canvas guided by smooth drag-and-drop functionalities. That said, when building your web design blueprint, keep the following hacks in mind:
A website page worth it's salt should be clear and self-explanatory. The logic is simple. With human attention spans lowering to 12 seconds, overburdening your visitor with too much information (or the lack thereof) can be counterproductive.
Here are a few tips that can help ensure your website page is self-explanatory. Let's take a look at Headspace's Home Page:
Key takeaway: Your website page's navigation, as well as the other pages, should be simple, logical, and neat, offering users all the information they'll need without any thought or effort.
As mentioned above, offering directional, aka visual cues, can help draw your user's attention to specific areas on the website that you'd want your visitor to focus on. You need to use the right images, colors, and layout that sit well with the overall design. Take a look at the Sweetish House Mafia's website below:
Your eyes immediately wander to the gorgeous image of the cookie, right?
The website uses high-quality images well while producing relevant and crisp content. Plus, at any given point in time, the visitor can click on the WhatsApp link icon, the "Order now" button, or the "Rewards" section and engage with the website:
Key takeaway: You can use colors, symbols (such as arrows), images, and icons as visual cues to gain your reader's attention and subtly nudge them to take the desired action. Slight tweaks in the overall design can give a huge ROI.
For instance, people generally focus on an image on the home page instead of condensed content. A user typically looks at the top-right corner of a home page for the navigation menu. Brightly colored CTAs or CTAs in bold tend to catch the user's attention faster. Moreover, you can use line-of-sight to draw user attention (as shown below):
Here, the user's attention is bound to drift to the "Newsletter Sign Up" section first as the designer strategically uses the image of a man looking to the left (where the newsletter signs up information is listed).
Surely, you must have heard the term user-friendly being used one too many times in web designing circles, but what does it truly mean?
A user-friendly website requires your visitor to put in little to no effort when browsing through the pages or completing a purchase. Here are the top-4 strategies to embrace to help your users feel comfortable while getting to know your product/service through your website:
Key takeaway: As the name suggests, a user-friendly website keeps the user's needs at heart and offers core functionalities to make the browsing experience seamless, pleasurable, and friction-free.
White space, also known as negative space, is your page's white or blank section. Take Evernote's website, for example:
Notice how calm and peaceful the design makes you feel. That's the beauty of white space. As a thumb rule, never clutter your page with innumerable images, texts, or call-to-action buttons. This can leave your users feeling overwhelmed, confused, or lost.
In fact, contrary to popular opinion, leaving white space can help catch your user's attention in the respective area:
Key takeaway: If you wish to enhance your website's readability, empower users to focus on the 'right' elements, and eliminate unnecessary distractions, using sufficient and strategically placed white space is the way to go.
Let's get one thing straight: If the website's font isn't legible and easily accessible, your visitors are going to make an effort to re-read the content. This is where special care needs to be taken to ensure that you choose the right font type and style, as Apple's website demonstrates below:
The font sizes may differ, but the font type stays consistent.
Additionally, while using white space is regarded as offering 'breathing space to your website, inserting too much of it when drafting your content can make your website look unprofessional and downright off:
Key takeaway: Using an incorrect font style can make or break your design. Additionally, it helps to keep the number of fonts to a minimum. As we saw above, it helps to choose a typeface that is easily readable across sizes. Finally, the lines should be crisp and short. As a big no, never use sentences or phrases in All-Caps or blinking text for your website, which can get annoying.
Here's the final advice: Engaging in regular A/B testing can help you understand where you're going wrong and where you're going right. It can also highlight your customer's pain points so that you can make minor alterations to leverage huge benefits. Take a look at Groove's example below:
Initially, the company was experiencing low conversion rates (2.3%). On investigating and testing, they discovered the company's message was being misread. In the second round of designing, the brand decided to focus on the content first and then move on to the design - a slight change in messaging and a tiny maneuver later, their conversion rates were up to 4.7%.
Key takeaway: Consistent A/B testing your website is the final leg of the web designing process and one that pays off huge dividends. By understanding how your users react to your website in real-time, you can offer an end-to-end personalized user experience.
Web designing is an art form, but it also requires strategic thinking. Employ these time-tested strategies outlined and give your website a fighting chance in a sea of sameness.
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Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Founding Director at Middleware. He has extensive experience in marketing, team building and operations. He often seeing working on various GTM practices and implement best one to generate more demand. He is also founded a digital marketing blog - TheNextScoop.
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