Best practises website design
Web design is a complex subject. Designers and developers have to consider both visual appearance how the website looks and functional design how the website works. With so many things that you need to take into account, the process of design can be tricky. The first thing to consider is your user flow, or the path by which the visitor will navigate through your website.
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Usability Best Practices
Free Assessment:. Take this free 10 question assessment and learn how your website can start living up to its potential. By Christine Austin. Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI, according to HubSpot. To help shape and optimize the readability of your content, you need it to be facilitated by a blog design that enhances the reading experience and highlights the most important information. It needs to be able to draw customers into headlines, entice interactions, optimize for conversions, and create a lasting impression.
But where do you start? How do you organize everything to increase your blog's subscribers and session duration while also keeping it aesthetically pleasing? Free Assessment: Website Performance Assessment.
For example, videos live in a video library, articles on a blog, whitepapers, and ebooks in a resource center — you get the idea. Pretend the user is you, and you are on a journey to discover more about a particular topic. My guess would be the latter. Aside from ease, a cumulative learning center approach makes it more likely your user will spend more time on your site since the barrier of finding what they want has been decreased significantly. This will also likely result in an increase of your pages per session, which Google uses as criteria when ranking your site.
The higher pages per session, but better your ranking. So, what should this look like? From there, you can filter by different personas, topics, or content types using the left side menu. Then, using the top right dropdown, you can sort by recent posts, or most popular. In this approach, pieces that are the most comprehensive, such as pillar pages , are listed first. Below are recommended pieces — ones that are either the most popular or would be most useful for someone seeking knowledge on that specific topic.
This helps the user identify individuals they should continue to seek content from, while simultaneously building trust with those authors. And finally, there is a feed of blog articles and podcasts organized by most recent, which updates automatically as new articles come out.
Overall, both approaches accomplish similar goals — getting your users the most relevant content possible. Depending on how your content is currently organized, and how your website's built, one approach may be better than the other. To rank well for competitive keywords and drive traffic to our website, most of the articles we write are around words.
This is where summary boxes are really handy. Traditionally placed towards the beginning of a blog article, these boxes are where you can add in short answers to questions your article elaborates on. Not only does this make it easier for users to find the info they want, but Google will often use the content in these boxes for featured snippets. This means you show up as the first post on the SERP search engine results page , setting you up for more click-throughs for your article.
One of the most UX-friendly layouts to solve for this is card-based design. As we know, physical cards baseball, basketball, Pokemon, etc have been around for quite some time and serve as easy ways to visually display and organize information. Card design is also now frequently applied throughout the web. They should have a consistent, repeated structure, but use different image and font sizes to represent the most important to least important elements of the card to make them more legible for those reading them.
In their card layout, they highlight the featured image and title as the most prominent elements. Then, they also included excerpts, which not only help users decide whether or not the article is right for them, but can entice them to click through if they were on the fence.
They also have dates that allow the user to recognize if the article is new or current, and authors with pictures to humanize the brand and establish thought leadership. As blogging becomes more prominent and social media becomes more visual, one of the most effective and differentiating things you can do for your blog is incorporating large, non-stocky hero images.
While their featured image may seem large, so much so that it pushes down the content, it also draws the eye. In terms of hierarchy, it also adds a nice anchor to the top of the page, allowing the user to easily recognize where the article begins and re-emphasize the topic at hand. Feel free to play around with your layout.
While companies like Intercom choose to go full width on their images, others, like Drift , overlap their articles title over half of the hero area, allowing the body text to peek above-the-fold.
This gives more balanced focus to the hero image and title while making it more convenient for your users to start reading immediately, as opposed to having them scroll first before seeing text. One of the easiest places to start achieving a clean and organized design is by utilizing a grid system.
This technique has been used widely throughout print layouts in newspapers and magazines to improve reading and the absorption of content easier. Grid systems in print mediums can also vary depending on the layout of the medium. In recent years, this technique has been applied to websites to help with responsive design and provide a consistent experience for users across a variety of screen sizes. Imagine you have a printed 8. At its current state, it's fairly easy to read, but what would happen if you stretched the paper to 18 inches wide?
For most people, it becomes significantly more challenging to go from line to line reading. This is why you see newspapers and magazines employ more narrow column formats. This idea is also the same for blogs. It risks them losing their place, while also making your content appear shorter and awkwardly spaced. One company that does this well on their website is Helpscout. Notice how they utilize the grid to keep their blog content contained in the middle of the page.
By limiting where the content can go, they avoid you having to scroll side-to-side to read. This technique also gives you a healthy amount of whitespace throughout your blog. It can cause eye strain, especially on digital screens. You want your website's font sizes, especially on your blog, to be the last thing users are complaining about. So now comes the question — what font sizes should I be using? When it comes to body font, my experience leads me to say somewhere in between 17px to21px, depending on what font you are using some are naturally larger than others.
For your headings size and a more in-depth analysis as to why this all matters, I suggest checking out this article. It dives further into some of the most common sizes used for header tags, from desktop to mobile.
If you are looking for some examples of websites that have mastered typography and sizes on their site, I suggest checking out these companies:. This helps dictate the hierarchy of the cards. Medium's use of very bold and consistent font sizes, combined with the neat organization of their blog cards, makes it very easy for users to scan the listings available. Typically, people are coming to blog articles with the intent of skimming them until they find the section s that answers their questions or pique their interest.
Copyhackers does a phenomenal job at this. Social sharing links aka buttons that let people easily post your article to their social media profiles are one of the easiest ways to encourage people to distribute your content for you, but many sites aren't granting that same experience for tablet and mobile users.
Those same people are also browsing social platforms on their mobile devices, so you can bet they are willing to share content on mobile too so long as they find it knowledgeable and have an easy means to do so.
Make sure you not only have social share links but that they are easy to find and click. NBC takes a similar approach by also putting their share options in a fixed top bar that appears once the user scrolls past a certain point on the page.
This placement of your social links can also be easily applied to desktop. They place their social sharing links in the top right of their article navigation. The navigation sticks to the top of the page and follows you as you scroll down, meaning the social buttons are always accessible. Bonus tip : You may notice recently some sites utilizing Facebook Messenger or Slack as additional platforms to share on. This is done to make it easy to get content to users on the platforms and software they are using the most.
If you know your users are hanging out somewhere new, make sure your social links reflect that. This keeps your experience current and decreases the potential for missed social sharing opportunities in the most popular platforms. Many of us find ourselves with a healthy amount of traffic but struggle to get the number of subscribers or conversions that we want. This is where utilizing an enticing and aesthetically pleasing lead magnet on your blog can be very desirable.
While many people use the lead magnet as a stand-alone offer throughout the blog, a more strategic use is it as an offer that's received when people subscribe to your blog. It incentives the act of subscribing. Once you figure out what offer works best for your audience, you now need to make it visually appealing. After a user scrolls past a few of the listed articles, a call-to-action to either download a guide or subscribe can be placed. It should comfortably fit into your listing page while using a different variation of the layout and colors to stand apart from the articles.
When implementing it, you need to make sure it is easily distinguishable. For example, darkening the background and creating a white container can help emphasize the popup and prevent the users from being distracted by the blog under the black overlay. These will ensure a better experience when users encounter them, which will ultimately lead to each performing the best they can. Your authors put a lot of time and effort into creating the content for your blog, and you should celebrate that by posting them as the author of their respective articles.
Inc keeps their blog pages nice and simple. They start with the author's photo, bio, and social handles. Many of the users who visit your website are on a journey to learn more about a particular topic. Your website should help them advance in that journey. The best way to do this is by featuring related articles or resources on the same page for them to click into next. These should ideally be related either by topic or keywords, not random articles you want to force people to visit.
One way to do this in your blog layout is to periodically place individual in-line links throughout an article. When doing this, you need to use styling that indicates slight separation from the reading flow. You can also take the approach of adding related articles to the end of an article. This might be more appealing to folks who would prefer to keep people focused on the article they are reading for longer.
Best Practices: Resources for Web Design and Development
Great content is essential to helping people understand the issues that nonprofits work on, particularly policy and advocacy nonprofits and research institutes who work on complex, systemic challenges. And this content is usually sophisticated, nuanced, and…. Which can make it really inaccessible for most audiences. Unfortunately, the way this important content is designed in content-heavy nonprofit websites contributes to making ideas less accessible, which can make audiences uninterested in engaging—and as a result, undermine change. People come to quick conclusions about an organization while visiting their website—and sorry designers audiences ultimately come to website for the content.
Guide to Web Design Best Practices for 2022
We spend a lot of time online reading news, navigating websites and using web apps. In some cases, our experience online is not the best that we could have. Making the experience of the website memorable is more important than what the website says. Users often forget the data and salient points of content, but they will remember how it made them feel. It works in advertisements, why not use it on web content? Graphics, layout, text, and interactive elements work in synergy to present the user with an experience, not just present them with information. UX design is a consequential piece of application and web work. Making your page stand out from the sheer quantity of websites and information on the internet is essential. Modern websites contain more visual and interactive qualities to strike at more emotional responses to help them stand out in the highly competitive world. It is a must that your website is scannable because people do not read websites, they scan them.
Web Design Best Practices: A Helpful Guide
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn More. The header plays a key role in the design of a website and sets the tone for its every other aspect. Especially now in the era of triumphant minimalism, when various eye candies often get ruthlessly but fairly expelled. Sometimes there is nothing else left for the eye to catch, so the role of website header design has increased significantly.
Top Web Design Trends for 2022
Trusted by Call-to-action in web design — and in user experience UX in particular — is a term used for elements in a web page that solicit an action from the user. The most popular manifestation of call-to-action in web interfaces comes in the form of clickable buttons that when clicked, perform an action e. Image captions are an often-overlooked element of Web design. As long as they include the proper photo credits or identifying information about the image subject, not much more thought is given to them.
Web Design
An old way of thinking has it that a website only needs HTTPS if it deals with sensitive data like credit card numbers or user info. This is no longer true. Not using HTTPS also allows for less reputable network providers and third parties to inject ads into your site. These technical reasons are surpassed by the fact that visitors will perceive your site as less secure if it lacks the happy sometimes green padlock in the address bar. There are a host of things you need to do if you're on WordPress. At the most basic level, you need to keep WordPress and your plugins up to date, as outdated installations and plugins are often exploited. If a plugin is deprecated, you need to delete it and find a replacement.
Best practices for website header design
In an age of widely-available mobile internet, handheld devices have taken over every aspect of our lives. This is great for business owners, as with so many people glued to screens for so much of the time, it's now extremely convenient to connect to them, and broaden your business's reach. Business owners should be celebrating the era of the smartphone, because it means you can advertise more than before, at any time of the day, and gain custom with no extra effort. However, does your digital marketing strategy focus on mobile friendly website design: and, more importantly, can you be reached by the market you're working in as easily as you should be?
Your visitors are not blank slates. They are not focused on the actual design of websites. Web design standards are norms and models for web page layouts and UX features, used by marketers and web designers in comparative evaluations. They are guidelines for usability. To answer this question, we created a checklist of 14 web design elements, then looked at marketing websites to see just how standard these standards really are. Using guidelines from an earlier NN Group article, we use the following thresholds:.
In a saturated online world, providing a unique user experience and a creative design look and feel are absolutely essential for the success of your landing pages. But what are the necessary elements to achieve this in ? A landing page is a purpose-built web page for the promotion of a specific product or campaign. Landing pages should be conversion-oriented with a specific goal in mind. However, to boost conversion rates of website visitors, you need much more than a regular website or homepage. You need landing pages.
When is the last time you saw an old-school HTML built website ranking highly in search engines? Or a website built using only Adobe Flash? Each passing year has brought new features, new standards, just about new everything to websites and their design. Because of this, websites have had to continuously change and evolve to stay current with the trends and demands of website visitors and search engines alike.
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