If people buy into your website design, chances are, they’ll buy into the products you offer.

Well-designed websites push the boundaries of design aesthetic, usability, and interactivity to create an exceptional user experience. When a consumer navigates to your homepage, it only takes 50 milliseconds for them to decide to leave. Your website design not only sets the first impression for your business, but it can also enhance your credibility and increase your conversion rates.

In this article, we’re discussing 6 key design elements that will elevate your website design.

Web Design Trends:

These 6 key design elements are of the utmost important and should be the first in your list of considerations as you build an optimized consumer-forward website. Let’s dive right in!

1. Visual Hierarchy

On landing pages, it’s particularly important to anticipate how — and in what order — visitors will consume your content. This is when visual hierarchy comes to play.

Creating a logical visual hierarchy ensures you create an intentional flow of content. Eye-tracking research has actually analyzed why people focus on certain elements on a page over others. Consumers’ eyes follow an F-pattern when looking at information-dense webpages, and they follow a Z-pattern when analyzing pages less heavy on text.

Most importantly, your visual hierarchy assigns a priority to each element and block of content on a page. It’s the reason that headlines appear above body copy, and that menus appear at the top, left, bottom, or right side of a page.

2. Navigation

Your navigation matters — it impacts how your visitors get around your site and find the information they need. 

When it comes to designing your website’s navigation, simplicity is key. Animated hover effects and multi-tiered sub navigation menus may look cool, but they also may overcomplicate your website.

Here are some key components to include in your navigation design:

• Informational Footer: Footers help users navigate your website without cluttering up the design. Because the footer is at the bottom of the page, it’s the ideal place to house a small site map, contact information, important links, and context for your site.

• Search Bar: Search is extremely important in website navigation – over half of web users use it as their primary navigation method. Including a prominent search bar and search button will greatly improve user experience.

• Side Bar: In addition to easing navigation, sidebars can house content that would have otherwise not fit on the page, give visitors value-added material, share live feeds from social media channels, and more.

3. Layout

Plenty of websites exhibit brilliant colors, vivid images, and useful content, but it’s the site’s layout that can really make or break the design. If elements are organized haphazardly and without order, you’ll probably leave your site visitors confused.

Your website’s layout should be both aesthetic and functional. Here are some common types of layouts — most of which that are very self-explanatory:

• Zig-zag Layout

• F-shaped Layout

• Grid-based Layout

• One-column Layout

• Split-screen Layout

• Featured Image Layout

• Asymmetrical Layout

Remember when we touched on visual hierarchy and eye-tracking research? Your site’s layout and visual hierarchy go hand-in-hand. They should enable stability and structure in a layout, giving designers a logical template for laying out different elements.  

4. Spacing

Web designers have struggled to find a happy medium between too much white space and too little. Nonetheless, whitespace it essential — it acts as a buffer between all of the elements on your webpage.

White space in design does not mean that everything is all white. Far from it, white space can make use of other colors and textures. It includes everything from line and letter spacing, to gutters and margins, to the space surrounding graphic elements on the page.

Despite the simplicity of spacing, it can be seemingly impossible to get right without it looking like something is missing in your layout. So, if you do choose to use a large amount of white space, make sure you include other bold elements like typography or graphic elements that stand well on their own.

5. Large, Responsive Hero Images

A hero image is essentially a large, attractive header.

Because of its prominent position in a site’s visual hierarchy, it is most likely the first visual element your consumer will encounter. But hero images don’t have to simply be photographs. To create more personalized experiences, web designers have begun to incorporate vector backgrounds, illustrated artwork, and video content into the hero image. They’ve also made use of animated hero images using videos, sliders, or carousels.

Although there are many ways to design a hero image, an effective one should always convey the unique value proposition and contextualize a website’s content.

6. Mobile Compatibility

We live in a mobile age, where information is often exchanged between smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. That being said, there are greater chances your consumers will receive their first impression of your business on a mobile interface.

Some of the biggest companies, like Lyft and Uber, have taken a mobile-first approach to marketing in which their websites are extremely intuitive on mobile devices. Clickable buttons should be sized appropriately for fingers to tap, typography should be big enough to read on a small screen, and navigation should be effortless.

Not to mention, a mobile-friendly website will ultimately lead to more conversions — 67% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a website that is mobile-friendly.

Takeaway

Content may still be king in marketing, but no one wants to read anything on a poorly designed website. A website’s visual content entails a variety of factors, including layout and formatting, photography and imagery, and white space and graphic design. The visual appeal of your website can play a huge role in driving conversions and should not be taken lightly.