Web Design: The Right Way

20 Jul 2017

In this day and age, every brand is competing to have the biggest online presence. There are many factors that contribute to a business’ online success, but the biggest factor by far is the quality and strength of their web design. A great website mustn’t only be pleasing to the eye, but must also be easy-to-navigate, engaging, and tailored to meet all of the requirements of its users.

Here are 3 of the main elements we believe turn your web design from ‘nice’ to ‘amazing’!

User-Friendly Navigation

The main question you should be asking yourself when revamping your website is, ‘can the user find what they want?’.
If it’s not clear or easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for on your site, the only part of your site they will be exploring is the back button. When it comes to navigating through your site, you want it to be a smooth and straightforward process, that lets people find what they want quickly and easily.

Arranging your website and its content into well-placed and positioned menus can be vital to the user-friendly experience you want your visitors to receive. No matter how many links and menus, ultimately your website has to be able to able to to get your visitors from the landing page to the ‘conversion page’, where you want sales, sign ups, or other conversion actions to take place.

Example: Brian Robinson Machinery’s website features a super easy to use navigation bar to help users navigate their site with ease.

A picture speaks a thousand works…

Modern websites are all about the visuals. It’s fair to say that images continue to enhance the online experience, that’s why more and more websites are relying on images and graphics to capture the attention of visitors and keep them engaged in their content, when they are used effectively.

When there is a blank space or too much text in one place it can be tempting to throw an image in there and that might not even have anything to do with the content you’ve placed it with. Images that are included in a web page for the sole purpose of filling a white space don’t ‘wow’ anyone.

The images you use should clearly demonstrate the following to be suitable and purposeful to the point you’re trying to get across:

Don’t just use images for the sake of it. Use images to create a powerful piece of content and enhance your user experience, rather than just filling up white space or making a web page more visually interesting, and in 2017 you don’t even need a professional photographer to take your website’s images, because many high spec smartphones have built in cameras that are of just as high quality! This means there’s no excuse for poor images on your website.

Example: Conyers School use large images to welcome their user, while also clearly demonstrating the services that they provide throughout their entire website.

Quality over quantity

Readability and typography of is an essential part of web design. Text in web design can be anything from simple and engaging to wild and exciting, but above everything it has to be readable. Along with being helping create a good readability for your users, typography can also aid when it comes to SEO (search engine optimisation), and ranking higher on search engine results pages.

At Hush our experienced web designers know that using 2 or 3 fonts throughout the process of designing a website, will help make your brand easily recognisable to more and more users. Using basic fonts for your website should aid you in avoiding issues with fonts being available in all computers and internet browsers.

Example: Take a look at Narrative’s website and the range of typography techniques to clearly separate individual blocks of text, along with colourful dividers to emphasise the different sections.

If you want beautiful and bespoke website design like that of our clients shown above, get in contact with our web design and development team on 01325 361 729, or pop in for a coffee and a chat!