There’s a lot that goes into designing a killer website. There are so many aspects of the design to think about like the colors, typography, content, layout, images, and structure just to name a few things. If you’re trying to make a website that is pleasing to the eye and also functions well, it helps to have a frame of reference you can rely on. That’s why we’ve come up with a list of five important design principles to guide you throughout the design process.

1. Be Visually Pleasing 

A good place to start is the visuals. You want to come up with a design that is specifically catered to your target audience. What’s visually pleasing to one group of visitors may not be necessarily so for another group. That’s why it’s hard to take an existing design from niche or market and use it as the foundation for another. So what makes your design visually pleasing to your audience?

You want to start with the relevancy. What imagery, photos, and logos are important to your audience? Then you want to move into the colors. Study the colors that other well-known websites in your market or industry are using as a starting point. Get an idea of what colors your audience has attached to your type of product or service category.

Finally, come up with a unique design. You probably have an idea of the type of designs that your competitors are using. Coming up with a design that stands out will help your audience see you differently. Try using different imagery, photos, branding elements, and visual aids to create an unforgettable design.

2. Aim for Simplicity 

While you do want your web design to be unique, it’s easy to go overboard and overdesign your site. Having too many sections and including too many elements can distract visitors from the main purpose of your site. This will hurt your conversion rates and increase abandon rate. When it comes to web design less is almost always more. You want to ensure that your site is easy to understand.

Here are some great ideas for simplifying your design. Start by using more negative space. This helps users distinguish different parts of your pages. Limit the amount of choices that are available if you can help it. This will lead users more towards a defined navigation path. Finally, ensure that the navigation menu is clean, intuitive and organized.

3. Design for Usability and User Experience 

At the end of the day, your goal is for users to interact with your site. You also want them to be satisfied with the browsing experience. That brings us to the topic of usability and user experience. You want to enable users help reach their goals on your site while also making it rewarding to use. Here are some ways to go about doing this.

– Create a navigation menu that’s easy to access. Larger menus might benefit from drop down format for mobile users while a full menu for may be preferable for desktop users.

– Enable users to come up with their own solutions. This can be done by offering various options (adding back to top button, offering a remove all button on shopping cart, allowing users to fix mistakes, etc.).

– Keep the design elements consistent so that it’s easy to learn and cohesive throughout the whole browsing session.

– Ensure your website appears properly across all browsers and devices. Don’t assume that a responsive theme or template is enough.

– Make sure you put a lot of focus into reducing the loading time of your website. This is especially important since you’ll be dealing with a lot of mobile device users.

– Use layouts that are easy to understand. Make sure different parts of your sites/pages are distinguishable from each other.

– Use testing tools to figure out what design changes result in improved performance whether you’re looking to increase the time spent on your site, clickthroughs to deeper pages, engagement metrics, or lead/sale conversions.

4. Come Up with a Focused and Engaging Design 

A big part of creating a killer design is keeping things focused and engaging. There are many things you can do to help you achieve these two qualities. First, start out with a visual hierarchy. Make sure the important elements are placed from top to bottom and left to right. Follow that up with visual cues. Use familiar logos (search, help, exclamation buttons), graphical indicators (arrows, stars, borders) and colors (for web buttons and links) to guide your users.

To make your website engaging, start with the typography. Use a font that has strong readability. Ensure that your font size has strong readability for all devices. Have a variety of font sizes and colors throughout your content for different purposes. Then continue with the imagery. Include relevant images and photos next to your content to add context or bring attention to important parts of your content.

Finally, create contrast with different colors, layouts, buttons and functionalities in a way that add value to your users. Don’t forget that one of the principles is to maintain simplicity while you’re doing this.

5. Improve What’s Happening in the Background 

How a website functions in the background is now just as important as how it looks on the outside. If you plan on marketing your website online, you want to start by making sure that your code and design is built to be SEO friendly. For example, graphical navigation buttons may be pretty but they don’t indicate to search engine spiders what kind of page that link goes to.

A big part of how quickly your website loads is your code and design. You want to remove redundant code, reorganize how your CSS loads, and load certain parts of your pages first. You also want to make sure you’re not using problematic scripts or plugins for your site that causes issues for users. There are a lot of things that you can optimize in the background but the idea here is that you shouldn’t dismiss the technical details of your website as it plays an important role in your design.

These five design principles will help you immensely if you make you want to make a website that’s truly unforgettable. There are always going to be things you can improve and changes you can make. But going back to these principles will help you stay focused on the bigger picture.