Essential Principles of Good Web Design

A website design has to be good enough to be able to get all the exposure that the site deserves. To beat the competition, gain visibility on the search engines and enhance user experience, the web designer should follow some essential principles of a good web design- balance, spacing, navigation, typography, relevance, alignment and sharpness.

With hundreds of websites being launched every day, it is becoming more and more difficult to get noticed on the Internet. Some website owners resorted to unethical means to rank highly on the search engines, but the changes in the ranking algorithm of Google has seized such activities. Now only those websites that follow the principles of web design get preference by the search engine and can fight for a top ranking on the SERPs. If you too want to gain preference by the search engines and enhance user experience, you must incorporate the following steps into your website design:

Balance: A website has to maintain symmetry throughout the web design in order to ensure that all the elements on the site are well balanced. In order to maintain the balance in the website design, you need to visually assess the position, colour, contrast, size and design elements.

Spacing: Stuffing the pages of a website with too much of content, images and advertisements, can only make them look cluttered and unreadable. Proper spacing on the web pages has to be maintained in order to ensure that the words and images on the web pages are able to convey the right message. There are three aspects that need to be considered in spacing- space between the text lines, padding and white spacing. If all the text on the web page is placed too close to each other, it would make no sense. Similarly, if the images touch or overlap the text on the page, it would not be visually appealing and may also hide part of the text. White space is another crucial element in making the web page readable.

Navigation: Poor navigation is one of the most frustrating things a user experiences while surfing a website. If the users are unable to figure out where to go, the web design is surely a failure. To prevent such a scenario, the website designer should give a lot of thought in making the navigation simple and easy to use. The design should be such that the user would be able to answer the following questions- Where is I right now? Where should I go from here?

Typography: Text is a vital element in the website design and the web designer should ensure that it is readable and visually pleasing. That is determined on the basis of the font size, types, spacing, line length and colour.

Relevance: All the elements on a website should add meaning to it. No irrelevant information should be put on it just for the sake of filling up space. Inapt details give an unprofessional image of the website owner as well as the designer. Thus, one should refrain from doing so and should just stay on the defined path.

Alignment: Unorganised web pages make even the most useful information appear irrelevant. Aligning your web design makes it look more consistent and ordered.

Sharpness: Last, but not the least, the web design should be sharp and crisp. Proper layout, clear images and well-defined content should be a priority.

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