What is web design and its principles

Today, creating a website is one of the pillars of having an online presence. It’s a dynamic and active world, constantly evolving, offering improvements in user experience that satisfy not only the owners’ objectives but also those of their visitors.

Web design is a gateway for leads visiting your page to follow the conversion funnel, thereby increasingly positioning your page in search engines and boosting sales.

Here, we’ll tell you about web design, its benefits, and provide some important tips to consider when designing and building your website.

What is Web Design?

Web design is the art of planning and organizing website content so that it can be shared and accessed online with just a click.

Web design creates the overall appearance we want our page or website to have. It involves many elements in the creation process, such as planning and building each object we want to have, ranging from structure and layout to images, their placement, color palette, graphics, and fonts used.

This is how we end up with a page for our brand and how we want our visitors to see it.

It’s an important process that requires numerous components working together to create a final experience that includes graphic design, user experience design, interface design, SEO (or search engine optimization), and content creation.

All these elements are crucial because they determine how your page will look, feel, and function. We can’t neglect one for the sake of another… All of them make the experience attractive and help achieve the objectives you have for your website.

This is why web design is often a collaborative process. It combines knowledge and tools from other areas of marketing and engineering, which can optimize performance and focus on broader processes and results.

For this reason, many people tend to confuse web design with web development, so before we continue, let’s explain what each one entails.

Web Design vs. Web Development

As we’ve mentioned, web design refers to the visual design and aspects that involve the entire user experience, which we’ll delve into further later in this article.

Meanwhile, web development refers to building and maintaining the structure of the site. It includes complex and intricate coding systems that ensure the entire website functions properly and offers a good page experience.

What does this mean?

While the designer is responsible for placing a call to action (CTA) box with an attractive design and copy in a visible and accessible location for visitors, the developer ensures that the button redirects the user to the correct place when clicked.

After all, if users can’t use a function, it might as well not exist…

So, in web design, the person will take all your ideas and turn them into a mockup showing how the website will look in the future, handling all the creative and dynamic aspects of your website’s design.

On the other hand, web developers will take that mockup and translate it into a coding language so that it can be displayed on the web. They are the ones who make all the tools, links, embedded pages on the site, and all possible customization options functional.

Now that you know the difference between the two, let’s look at the benefits of web design.

Benefits of Web Design

Web design combines inbound marketing techniques that lead to increasingly higher goals in the digital marketing world being gradually achieved.

This is because inbound marketing focuses on creating trustful relationships with customers, generating and building a community around a brand or product, as well as increasing website traffic, among many others.

Having a page with excellent design is one of the major gateways we have to strengthen our company and products. Effective web design brings together multiple elements to promote conversions in the conversion funnel…

Let’s look at some of its benefits,

1. Consider the First Impression

When your audience visits your website, they get a first impression of your business. They will judge your business in seconds. In these initial moments, you want to make a positive impact on your visitors.

Generally, users don’t read, they just scan. You’ve probably done it too…

So, when analyzing a website, users look for certain fixed points or anchors to guide them through the page content. If the website looks unattractive, outdated, or cluttered, your visitors won’t have that great first impression you aim to create.

This may result in losing potential customers who will leave your page and go to a competitor.

Technically, this is often referred to as the ‘above the fold’ section.

2. Supports Your SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is one of the key elements and practices in web design, as it influences how content is published on the website while impacting how search engines crawl and index your page.

Visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo! largely depends on your SEO strategy. The best way to ensure satisfactory and proper web design practices (and to gain higher visibility in search engines) is to partner with a web design agency that knows what it’s doing.

If you have doubts about your SEO strategy or don’t know where to start, we can help you.

3. Builds Trust with Your Audience

Think about your own experience… Would you trust a page that looks poorly designed, where buttons are unclear or don’t work, or where the content is outdated?

If your visitors see that the design is poor, gloomy, or neglected, they are likely to leave as quickly as they entered: with just one click.

Users appreciate the quality and credibility that a page can provide about the brand.

That’s why if a website offers high-quality content to users, it’s more likely to make leads stay and want to learn more, or even quickly access the purchasing options you offer.

Content is as important as the design that supports it. They are two features that always go hand in hand.

4. Reflects Your Customer Service Image

Your website is like your online customer service representative. If the web page is bright, modern, attractive, and caters to needs without unnecessary distractions, visitors will feel more welcome to navigate through it.

This is because they will feel more comfortable clicking any CTA button for more information, to learn more about the brand or product…

Think of your web design as the digital face of your business, so it should be friendly, accessible, neat, and constantly updated, just as you would in a physical store, where you showcase your best window display and have the best-qualified staff to welcome your customers.

5. Helps Grow and Maintain a Consistent, Strong Brand Identity

Last but not least…

Consistent, excellent, and high-quality web design helps to strengthen and solidly position your brand. Even applying “small changes” can positively impact how users and potential customers perceive you.

This, in itself, allows your brand to remain coherent, consistent, and easily distinguishable from the competition.

Web design always considers a range of company factors when creating a webpage. It generates a visual language for the brand that should be solid in all contexts, ranging from including the logo, brand colors, and typography, business cards, email marketing design, to social media imagery.

Everything needs to be consistent… this creates a more notable impression that will make it more likely for current and potential customers to remember and always want to return.

Now that you know some of the most important benefits of focusing on a web design that satisfies all the needs of the company and your leads and customers, let’s look at the 8 principles of web design that will make your site a memorable place.

Web design principles

Web Design Principles

The principles of web design are based on a set of guidelines adopted by architects, marketers, and even graphic designers.

Like everything on the Internet, these evolve constantly to keep pace with the growth of websites and their efforts to stand out from the competition.

These guidelines have been adapted so that the result of a website’s web design encompasses both the quality of content and the aesthetic appeal and ease of use.

1. Balance

In web design, visual balance involves ensuring that elements placed in a single composition are not overwhelming and are balanced.

For example, if you divide your web page’s design with an imaginary line down the center, you can see how to organize elements for “visual weight” balance on both sides.

There can be:

• Symmetrical balance: equal on both sides of the imaginary line. In web design, this can evoke feelings of balance, beauty, and consistency.
• Asymmetrical balance: the visual weight is equal on both sides, but the composition and order of elements vary, yet it is equally balanced. This can reflect a modern approach and create a more dynamic and harmonious experience for the visitor.

2. Contrast

Contrast in web design involves placing juxtaposed elements next to each other so that one prevails and stands out. This creates excitement and attracts the viewer’s attention.

If you want to apply this to your web design, think about the specific elements you want to accentuate and how you’ll diversify them from the surrounding content.

Tip: Two of the most practical ways to apply contrast are with your brand and website’s color scheme by choosing complementary tones. You can also use two different but complementary fonts.

3. Emphasis

This web design principle reminds us that not all elements on a website are equal, hence the importance of good web design advice. Aspects such as the logo, an image, a CTA should be highlighted in different ways and locations on the page.

How can you do it?

Apply emphasis with the use of colors, lines, animations, shapes, balanced spaces, or sizes small or large according to their importance, ensuring that it becomes the dominant aspect of your composition.

4. Movement

Movement in web design guides visitors from one element to another. Think about how you want the user to navigate your site, whether it’s their first visit or they’ve entered several times.

You do this by considering the size, direction, and order of the elements in your website’s composition.

It’s about making a web design that guides the viewer and invites them to stay longer on the site, finding the information they need and making the user experience completely pleasant and satisfactory.

5. Rhythm / Repetition

In web design, rhythm focuses on the repetition of elements that generate cohesion and amplify a specific message.

When applied correctly, this principle will result in patterns that are very satisfying and visually appealing. It also supports consistency, a crucial factor in strengthening the composition of all elements.

On your website, you can create attractive design by repeating certain visual elements. You can alternate between the fonts you use (it’s recommended not to use more than two or three types of fonts within a website), the colors, and the separation of the different sections of the page.

6. Hierarchy

Hierarchy is one of the most complex principles of web design. As the concept indicates, it’s about highlighting the visual elements that are most important in the composition of the web page and organizing the rest in order of relevance.

Hierarchy allows people to identify a level of importance in the content, where to go, and concentrate their attention on the most essential elements of your brand or each of your products.

Yes, there are many things you must consider when thinking about hierarchy on your website, but you can start by analyzing certain factors we’ve already mentioned…

Let’s see,

• Size: users will first pay attention to the larger elements, highlighting their importance. Ensure that details like your company name or calls to action – CTAs are in a larger font than the rest of the content.
• Color: colors are very useful when highlighting content components on your web page. A palette that helps to have contrast in certain texts and icons will catch your visitors’ attention.
• Position: The position of an element within the design says a lot about its importance. Keep in mind that web pages contain certain sections that have been established in the digital world, such as the header and footer, to mention a few. Each section should contain organized information, taking care of hierarchy details.

7. Whitespace

It might seem strange, but the most important thing in web design is that considering all the principles you’ve been reading in this article, we aim for the page you want to create to be truly valuable for you and your visitors.

That said… Yes, it’s necessary to consider the “whitespace.”

What is it?

These are all the areas in the page composition that do not have visual elements. This includes the website’s margins, the spaces between

each block of text, and the negative space between images. Although it’s known as “white space,” these can also carry a background image, the color palette chosen for the page, or even web design patterns or texture.

These should be considered throughout the web design process, as they can be used to enhance the user experience. They should also be calculated (like all other principles) in a responsive web design and will avoid everything looking crowded, overloaded, or disorganized.

8. Unity

Finally, we come to unity, a fundamental principle of web design.

Unity is vital for a good website… We mean that the final result of all the design and different elements that compose it are located so that they all work very, very well together.

This is the last principle because it encompasses everything you’ve thought about and developed with your website’s web design. Achieving unity implies that each component has its place in importance, quality, content, and fulfills specific functions in the entire composition.

Remember, nothing should be useless or random… Aspects such as CTAs, content, links to other pages of your site, the logo, titles, images, icons… Nothing is placed at random.

Conclusion

As you can see, web design involves considering many elements to build a page that is accessible to your users, attractive, and above all, meets and satisfies the needs of your company and your visitors.

You should keep in mind that good web design is supported by usability and utility, not just visual appearance, which, while a determining factor, the consolidation of all the elements we’ve seen in this article, is what will determine the success or failure of a website.

Focusing on user-centered design has become a standard and necessary approach when having a profit and brand success-oriented website.

At Dazzet, we can answer all your questions and customize your page to meet your brand’s needs, so you can achieve those goals you’re striving for. Contact us.