9 Effective Web Design Best Practices

The web continues to become increasingly competitive and complex. For businesses, a powerful, user-friendly web presence is critical to success in today's market. However, with so many websites vying for user attention, making your brand stand out requires following the latest web design best practices.

When executed strategically, the top web design practices can lead to a better user experience, stronger brand engagement, and higher conversions. They also result in a website that is primed for search engine optimization, responsive on all devices, and accessible to everyone.

In this guide to web design best practices, we'll explore the most effective practices used by leading brands and designers today. We'll also look at Strikingly, which offers an easy and user-friendly way to implement these best practices.

What Is Web Design Best Practices?

Web design best practices are guidelines that help ensure a website is functional, user-friendly, and visually appealing. These guidelines cover everything from navigation and responsive design to color schemes and typography.

When you adhere to these practices, you can create a website that eye-catching and performs well on search engines like Google. Web design can increase site traffic and drive more business.

The Importance Of Following Web Design Best Practices

Following web design best practices is crucial for several reasons. First and foremost, it makes sure that everyone who visits your website, regardless of their device of choice or aptitude, can access and use it.

Additionally, adhering to these guidelines can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by making your site more easily crawlable by search engines like Google. SEO can help reach higher rankings in search results and increase visibility for your brand.

Who Can Benefit From Following Web Design Best Practices?

Anyone with a website or planning on creating one can benefit from following web design best practices. From small business owners looking to establish an online presence to individuals creating personal blogs or portfolios, adhering to these guidelines can help ensure success online.

However, web designing can seem challenging for non-designers. But, Strikingly changes that. It offers stylish, customizable website templates to give your brand a professional design aesthetic in minutes. With an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, you can easily tweak the templates by adjusting colors, fonts, images, and layouts to best suit your needs. Strikingly designer tools and web hosting also ensure that your website is fully optimized for SEO, social sharing, and a quality user experience on all devices.

In the following sections, we'll dive deeper into specific web design best practices and how Strikingly can help you implement them effectively.

1. Website Navigation

Website navigation is a crucial aspect of web design best practices for business. It can make or break the user experience, affecting how visitors interact with your site and ultimately impacting your bottom line. Here are some website design tips to keep in mind when designing your navigation:

Keep It Simple

When the topic of website navigation comes up, simplicity is crucial. Thanks to your menu's simplicity and clarity, users should be able to locate what they're seeking easily and without getting lost in a sea of options.

Use Clear, Descriptive Labels

Each menu item should have a clear and descriptive label that accurately describes the page or section it leads to. Avoid using vague or generic labels like Products or Services that don't provide enough context.

Consider A Sticky Navigation Bar

A sticky navigation bar stays fixed at the top of the screen as users scroll down the page, making it easy to access the menu no matter where they are on your site.

Include A Search Bar

In addition to traditional menus, including a search bar can help users quickly find specific content on your site. Make sure it's prominently shown and easy to use.

Use Strikingly's Website Navigation Tools

With Strikingly, designing a customized website navigation menu is made easy through a suite of useful settings and styles to choose from. You have full control over your navigation's content, layout, appearance, and functionality to create the exact experience you want for your visitors. Strikingly's navigation tools result in a professional menu that helps visitors intuitively explore all your website has to offer.

Image taken from Strikingly

2. Responsive Design

Responsive design has become an essential web design best practice.

What Is Responsive Design?

A great style of web design known as responsive web design enables a website to adjust to various screen sizes and devices. With responsive design, users may view your website exactly as intended on any device.

Why Is It Important?

A responsive website is crucial for businesses because it ensures all users have a positive experience when visiting your site. If your website is responsive, users may be able to navigate it or find the information they need, leading to frustration and ultimately causing them to leave your site.

Design With Mobile Users In Mind

It's important to keep mobile users in mind when designing your website. For mobile users, create a layout that works well on smaller screens and ensure that all content is easily accessible on mobile devices.

Some website design tips for designing with mobile users in mind include:

• Using large fonts and clear images
• Keeping menus simple and easy to navigate
• Ensuring that buttons are large enough for users to tap with their fingers

Use Strikingly's Responsive Design Templates

If you're looking for an uncomplicated way to create a responsive website, consider using Strikingly's responsive design templates. These templates are designed for small businesses and make creating a professional-looking website without coding experience easy.

Image taken from Strikingly

3. Color And Contrast

Regarding web design, best practices, color, and contrast are crucial in creating an effective website. Here are some website design tips on how to use Color and contrast to your advantage:

Using Color To Your Advantage

A color is a potent tool that can be utilized to develop brand identification, stimulate emotions, and create contrast. Consider your target demographic and the message you want to communicate when selecting colors for your website.

For example, bright and playful colors like reds, yellows, and blues might be appropriate if you're designing a children's toy store website. On the other hand, if you're designing a website for a law firm or financial institution, muted colors like blues and grays might be more appropriate.

Ensuring Adequate Contrast For Readability

Contrast is also an important factor in web design best practices because it affects the readability of your content. Users are likely to leave your site when text blends into the background or needs to be easier to read due to poor contrast with its background color.

To ensure adequate contrast for readability:

• Use high-contrast colors for text and background
• Avoid using light-colored text on light backgrounds or dark-colored text on dark backgrounds
• Test your website's color scheme using tools like WebAIM's Color Contrast Checker

Considering Colorblind Users

Approximately 8% of men and 0.5% of women are estimated to have color blindness. Keeping in mind colorblind users means that when designing your website, it's important to consider how users with color blindness will perceive your content.

To make sure that users with color blindness can still navigate your site effectively:

• Use high-contrast colors for text and background
• Avoid relying solely on color cues (e.g., use labels or symbols as well)
• Test your website using tools like Color Oracle or Vischeck to simulate how users with color blindness will see your site.

Avoiding Overuse Of Color

While Color is an important aspect of web design best practices, it's also important to avoid overusing it. Too many colors can be stupendous and distracting for users, making it hard for them to focus on your content.

To avoid overusing Color:

• Stick to a limited color palette (2-4 colors)
• Use colors strategically to draw attention to important elements
• Consider using shades of the same color instead of multiple bright colors.
  

Use Color Scheme On Strikingly

Using Strikingly's color scheme tools allows you to create a harmonious, customized set of colors for your brand and website style.

Image taken from Strikingly

4. Typography

Typography is an essential aspect of web design, and choosing the right fonts can make or break your website's overall look and feel. In this section, we'll discuss some best practices for typography and how Strikingly can help you achieve your desired look.

Choosing The Right Fonts

Choosing the right font is crucial in creating a professional-looking website. It's essential to choose a font that aligns with your brand's personality and values while remaining legible to all users. When selecting a font, Consider readability, style, and size.

Strikingly offers various fonts with options suitable for various industries and niches. You can also upload your custom fonts to ensure consistency across all your branding materials.

Using Consistent Font Styles And Sizes

Consistency is key when it comes to typography in web design. Ensure you use the same font styles and sizes throughout your website for a cohesive look that enhances user experience.

With Strikingly's easy-to-use customization tools, you can customize every aspect of your website's typography without any coding knowledge.

Prioritizing Readability

When designing a website, it's crucial to prioritize readability above everything else.

Strikingly offers responsive design templates that adjust automatically to different screen sizes while maintaining optimal readability for users across all devices.

Strikingly's Font Customization Options

Strikingly provides several customization options for fonts, including size, style, Color, spacing, and more. The platform lets you preview changes before publishing them live on your site.

With Strikingly's user-friendly interface and extensive customization options, you can create an attractive website with typography that aligns with your brand's values and personality.

Image taken from Strikingly

5. Images And Media

Visual elements such as images and media play a crucial role in web design. They can help tell a story, convey emotions, and make a website more engaging. However, using them appropriately is important to keep users from overwhelming or distracting.

Choosing Appropriate Images And Media

When selecting images and media for your website, it's important to consider their relevance to your content and audience. Choose high-quality visuals that align with your brand identity and message. Additionally, avoid using stock photos that look generic or staged. Instead, opt for original photography or illustrations that showcase your unique perspective.

Optimizing Image Sizes And File Types

Large images can slow down page load times, negatively impacting the user experience and SEO rankings. To optimize image sizes, compress them without sacrificing quality using tools like Adobe Photoshop or online services like TinyPNG. It's also important to choose the right file type for each image based on its content. For example, use JPEGs for photographs and PNGs for graphics with transparent backgrounds.

Creating Accessible Media

Accessibility is an important consideration in web design best practices for business. When creating visual content, ensure it's accessible to users with disabilities by providing alternative text descriptions (alt text) for images. Alt text should be descriptive but concise enough to fit the page's context. Accessible media helps screen readers understand and convey the image's content to visually impaired users.

Strikingly's Media Gallery And Editing Tools

Strikingly offers a full media gallery with thousands of free high-quality stock photos from Unsplash and Pexels. You can also upload images or videos directly from your device or social media accounts.

In addition, Strikingly provides built-in editing tools that allow you to crop, resize, and add filters or text overlays without leaving the platform - making it easy to create visually appealing content for your website.

Image taken from Strikingly

6. Accessibility

Designing a website accessible to all users should be a top priority for any business. You can ensure that everyone, including those with disabilities, can easily access and use your website design tips by making your website accessible.

To guarantee that people who are blind or visually impaired can still understand the content of your website, alternate text for images is a crucial accessibility element. You can ensure these users are included in the conversation by providing alternative descriptive text for images.

Making forms accessible is another important aspect of web design best practices for business. You can ensure all users have a positive experience on your website by designing easy-to-use and navigate forms.

Strikingly's accessibility features make it easy to design websites that are accessible to all users. With features like alt text fields and customizable form fields, Strikingly makes it easy to create websites that meet the highest accessibility standards.

7. Page Speed

Page speed is crucial for a successful website in today's fast-paced digital world. Slow loading times can lead to impatient visitors and lost business opportunities. Therefore, optimizing your website's page speed is vital to web design best practices.

Importance Of Page Speed For User Experience

According to research, people are more likely to leave if a website takes longer than three seconds to load. Page speed means that having a fast-loading website is essential for offering an excellent user experience and keeping visitors engaged.

Optimizing Images And Media

One of the main culprits of slow-loading websites is large image files or unoptimized media. To enhance your images, make sure they are in the correct file format (JPEGs for photographs, PNGs for graphics), compress them without losing quality, and resize them to the appropriate dimensions.

Minimizing Code And Scripts

Another way to improve page speed is by minimizing the code and scripts on your website. Minimizing code and scripts can be achieved by removing unnecessary plugins or widgets, using clean HTML and CSS code, and reducing the number of HTTP requests.

Some website design tips to minimize code include:

• Combining multiple CSS files into one
• Minifying CSS and JavaScript files
• Using asynchronous loading for JavaScript files

Enabling Caching

Caching allows your website's content to be stored on a visitor's device to load faster on subsequent visits. You can reduce server load times and improve overall page speed by enabling caching on your website.

To enable caching on your site:

• Use a content delivery network (CDN)
• Leverage browser caching
• Implement server-side caching

8. Content Strategy

Content is king, particularly when it pertains to the top website design. It's crucial to properly put together and organize the content of your website so that users can easily traverse it. The following are some suggested web design practices for producing quality website content:

Planning Website Content

Before you start creating content for your website, it's important to have a plan in place. Consider your target audience and what information they're looking for when they visit your site. Create a list of topics that interest them and prioritize them based on their importance. Once you have a list of topics, create an outline for each page on your site, which will help you ensure that all the necessary information is included and presented logically.

Organizing Content For Easy Navigation

Once you plan your content, it's important to organize it to make it easy for users to find what they're looking for. Use clear headings and subheadings to break up long blocks of text, and ensure each page has a clear purpose. Use bullet points or numbered lists to draw attention to important information and set it apart from the rest of the text.

Writing For Web Readability

When writing content for your website, keep in mind that people tend to scan rather than read every word on the page. Utilize short paragraphs, simple language, and plenty of white space to make your content more easily readable. Headings and subheadings should break up long material passages, and important topics should only occasionally be highlighted in bold or italic font.

Strikingly's Content Creation Tools

If you're not confident in your writing skills or don't have the time or resources to create high-quality content yourself, consider using Strikingly's built-in content creation tools. Strikingly offers a range of templates designed specifically for different types of websites and a drag-and-drop editor that makes it simple to create custom pages. You can also use Strikingly's built-in blogging platform to create and publish regular blog posts.

Image taken from Strikingly

9. Website Maintenance

Just as crucial as building a website is keeping it up. A well-maintained website can help with user experience, search engine rankings, and attracting and keeping visitors. The section below will discuss some of the best practices for maintaining your website.

Regularly Check For Broken Links And Errors

Broken links and errors can harm your website's credibility and negatively impact user experience. Therefore, checking for broken links and errors on your website is crucial.

You can use tools like Google Search Console or Broken Link Checker to identify broken links on your site. Once you've identified the broken links, fix them or redirect them to relevant pages on your site.

Update Content And Design As Needed

Keeping your website up-to-date is essential to ensure it remains relevant and engaging for visitors. Updating content regularly can also help improve search engine rankings.

Consider updating your content with new information or adding new pages to keep the site fresh. You should also update the design of your site periodically to keep up with changing trends.

Backup Website Data And Files

Backing up your website data is crucial in case of unforeseen circumstances like server crashes or hacking attempts that could result in data loss. You can use tools like UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy to back up your website data at regular intervals automatically.

Use Strikingly's Website Management Tools.

Strikingly offers a range of website management tools that make it easy to maintain your site without technical knowledge. With Strikingly's simple drag-and-drop interface, you can easily update content, add new pages or products, change the design of your site, backup data, and more.

Conclusion

Following web design best practices is essential for a successful website. With the implementation of these best practices, businesses can create visually appealing, user-friendly websites that attract and retain customers. Additionally, Strikingly plays an important role in simplifying the best website design for businesses of all sizes, providing a user-friendly platform and customizable templates. Leveraging Strikingly's accessible tools to create top-notch website designs can enhance the online presence of businesses and that too easily. And with the list of benefits, including SEO, improved conversions, strong brand recognition, and competitive advantage over others, there is no reason to delay signing up for Strikingly.