The success of a website greatly depends on its design. A lot goes into creating an effective and user-friendly website that attracts conversions. It’s important to pay close attention to how your own site is created and the website design principle driving it because your website serves as the face of your business on the web. You want to make sure that you are sufficiently represented through this online space.
Strikingly sets you up for success by providing a collection of modern website templates that were created with good design principles in mind.
1. Keep it simple
Simplicity is one of the most important website design principals you must adopt when creating your own website. Putting too much flash or too many design elements in a website may only confuse the visitor and take away focus from the actual message of the site. A clean and fresh website design helps customers find their way around your website. It also lessens the load on your server so your website loads faster. Too many design elements and unnecessary plugins have the tendency to slow your site down which can affect the user experience.
2. Keep your design consistent
Consistency makes your site look cohesive and put together. Using Strikingly’s website editor, play around with different color schemes and font combinations and choose the same styles all throughout your website. Stick to these design elements throughout development.
3. Smart choice of typography
If you want to get your message across, you must make your content easy to read. This is why the choice of typography is a crucial website design principle you should remember. Keeping your fonts visually appealing and readable contributes to the overall user experience. When people are able to read your message clearly, they are more likely to react to it positively.
4. Mobile responsiveness
Another modern website design principle you should always keep in mind is mobile responsiveness. With the ever growing population of internet users glued to their mobile devices, it’s important for websites to adapt and make sure that they are accessible to this audience. You are losing a lot of opportunities to attract conversions by not having a mobile responsive website. Strikingly takes care of this for you by ensuring that all its templates will render well on various screen sizes.
5. Right color scheme and visuals
Strikingly’s website editor comes with default options for color schemes that will work great on your selected template. However, if you want to make your site more personalized, use custom colors that reflect your company. If you’re clueless about the color combinations to use, look towards your business logo for branding guidelines. You can start by using the same custom shades that your logo uses.
6. Faster loading speeds
Good website design principle is based on creating a positive user experience. Making sure that the website runs smoothly and loads in a timely manner when a user “calls” for it contributes to the positive experience. Visitors get turned off by a website whose images fail to load properly or information that takes more than a few seconds to come up. With that in mind, it’s important that your design elements are lightweight to ensure that they don’t slow down your website. Be mindful of Strikingly’s recommended file sizes. While it’s important to have good quality visuals on your site, it’s also crucial that these visuals are not too big that, taken together, they affect the site’s performance.
7. Navigation should be intuitive
Finally, visitors should find it easy to get from one point in your website to another. If you’re running an ecommerce store, it should take them less than 3 clicks to complete a purchase and they shouldn’t have to fill out a very long form just to get their order sent. Make the entire experience easy by creating a logical page hierarchy and using clickable buttons as much as possible.
