👉 Learn 5 fundamental design ideas for your website

A website does not succeed on its design alone, or on the content it presents to visitors. Your company's site needs a style that attracts users, that is user-friendly and, of course, functional.

Of course each person, or each company, has their own style and a particular way of communicating; that does not mean, however, that there are no basic web design rules that make all the difference when you create a site. See these five quick tips that can help you head in the right direction and, very importantly, not drive clients away!

1. Keep your page minimalist and free of unnecessary ornament

The full content of a website is rarely read by visitors. On the contrary, people who arrive skip quickly between pages, picking up only keywords and short phrases. With these behaviours in mind, it is better to appeal to emotion than to word count. The less your potential clients have to read, the more easily they will process and assess what they are seeing, and that makes them follow exactly the steps you want them to follow. Text and call-to-action buttons (which prompt an action, such as calling) are necessary, of course, but make sure visitors to your website also see large headings or titles, as well as readable paragraphs. Using images or icons is an alternative way of getting your message across.

2. Always keep a visual hierarchy in mind

The age of writing on stone ended a long time ago. With computer and smartphone screens, and as technology evolves, the designer's job (whether web or graphic) is increasingly to organise content in a clear way. Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture potential clients' attention and tell them exactly what your company does. If you establish a clear hierarchy in all the content you want to present, readers or website visitors will, unconsciously, follow exactly the visual path the designer created. Applying colour, contrast, sizes and spacing to accentuate messages is what really sparks interest; make a point of showing that this is intentional. One of the best design elements that illustrate this idea are dividing lines. They help your website become clear and set different kinds of content apart, such as photo and text.

3. Create content that is easy to read

Readability measures how easily a person recognises words, sentences and paragraphs. When your website's readability is high, users can easily scan it and take from the text all the information they need. Getting good readability is relatively easy. Try these rules:

- Contrast is the key It is very important that there is enough contrast between the text and the background colour/image, so the letters are perfectly visible. Feel free to play with colours, but do not sacrifice readability for creativity.

- You will never be able to read what you cannot see Some time ago, websites had small type. Over the years, people realised that size 12 letters were hard to read online. One of the rules is always to have letters of at least size 16 (depending on the typeface, of course).

- Letters with or without serifs As we already told you in this article, serifs are the extensions or curves at the end of the letter stems. Sans-serif letters are generally the best choice in online text.

- Do not use more than three typefaces Always keep this in mind when you create your website. Some projects do, in fact, call for more elaborate typeface combinations, but if you need variety try not to let it affect the harmony.

4. Make sure the website is easy to navigate

Yes, breaking the rules can sometimes work, but a site's navigability should never be the place to do it. Do not send your visitors on a trip in the dark while they try to find their way around your company's website. If a site is simple to navigate, it will also be more easily indexed by search engines. The menu should be accessible and the information in it has to be clear.

5. Mobile friendly

These days, visits to websites come mostly from smartphones or tablets, so it is important to ask: ‘can my visitors see my site clearly?’ It is essential that the page adapts automatically to any type of screen. Besides benefiting the user experience, search engines will also index your site more easily. Not sure whether your website is responsive? Try accessing it from a smartphone or tablet. Simply put, if you need to use two fingers to pinch or zoom the screen to see the content, the answer is no.

Always talk to specialists so that your website stays in line with the rules! The results will not be long in coming.