Essential Elements of Successful Website Design

There’s lots to consider when building a website. Successful website design isn’t just about creating something that looks good, it’s a place where people come to not only find out about your brand but see what problems you can solve for them.

Website development takes time, skill and patience to get right. Whether you are creating a website for your services or an ecommerce website for products, there are some web design elements that remain the same. The key is in knowing how to create a memorable user experience that communicates in the correct manner and / or keeps them coming back for more. Every website visitor is different, so taking the time to build a website that engages each one differently while using modern web design to keep those connections is crucial.

Objective

The first element of modern website design (and any good marketing brief) is objective. Just as you must know and understand your brand objective/s, you must also be clear about the objective of your website. Web designers simply can’t do their job if they don’t know what they need to accomplish.

Before a single line of code is written, you should outline your goals. Having your goals front and centre makes things a lot more productive. It helps you figure out how the site should be managed, the types of content that should be on the site, your messaging, and more.

If you don’t have a plan of action and goals to achieve, the direction of the website may be incorrect and you'll fail to connect with your audience or deliver value for money against your investment.

Consider

• Who is your target audience? 
• What age group are you targeting? 
• Is your website going to be tailored for a specific industry? 
• Is it occupation-based? 
• Is there a specific gender you are targeting? 
• Other demographics in your user persona?

If you haven’t thought about or preferably researched any of these questions, you’re already behind the curve. A concrete user/buyer persona is at the forefront of good website design to ensure you are not just building a website just to have one!

Usability

Begining with the home page to every other page on your website, you must address the needs and pain points of your users. If they can’t navigate your site or are confused in any way, they will leave. If your site has multiple products or services, they should be able to search the content and have a seamless experience.

Your site should also be responsive and welcoming, no matter what type of device is being used. Your wireframe be start mobile-first to ensure you don’t lose out on mobile users. Try to avoid having too much information, keep your language simple, have a quick (to load) and easy layout (to navigate), and don’t make your paragraphs too long.

53% of all search volume is generated by mobile phones and tablets.

User Focus

Your users determine whether your site is good or bad within seconds so your website should be accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. Taking your own preferences into account when designing a website isn’t nessasarly the right course of action and why you must have a plan in place that directly addresses the wants and needs of your user personas - try not to get distracted and veer from this blueprint. 

Your content is not for you it's for your visitors, with a goal to get them to do something. Effective calls-to-action can take care of this - an experienced digital marketer or website designer will be able to help you with this, immediately engaging your visitor from the moment they reach your main landing page and assuring attention is held throughout the pages of your site. Consider what you would like visitors to your website to do. Could they be influenced to download useful branded information, take notes from a video, sign up to your email list, or purchase something. Each one of those interactions is called a conversation, and that’s the ultimate purpose of your website.

Once you get past these three initial web design elements, it’s time to get into the meat and gravy of your website design. Making sure you have all these components working together ensures you have a website that is functional, efficient, aesthetically pleasing and converts into sales or leads.

Bring your brand to life with your own professionally designed bespoke website, that works!

Navigation

Your website should be easy to navigate and fast to load. Your users should know where they are and what page they need to get to from the first interaction. Developing a site map and having clear directional navigation is an essential element. Don’t waste time having too many animations and other elements that will confuse your users. White space is always the best way to go (fact).

If your site has too many clicks to get to what they need, visitors will leave. Some designers use breadcrumbs to make sure users can navigate and easily get back to where they started.

Mobile

It’s difficult to imagine the digital world without mobile devices. Most people visit websites from their mobile devices instead of desktop computers. That means you must adapt to the times and keep up with the competition - designing your website for mobile-first is a must have.

Using a responsive web design to achieve this will help you rank in the search engines - who check how mobile-friendly your website is for mobile devices. The screen size of the devices accessing your site matters. That’s why the design should have the right design elements in place, ensuring navigational buttons and messages are accessible and not too small, together with legible copy that’s easy to read.

Branding

Branding is a crucial part of your overall design. While many businesses may start with colours they like, there’s real science behind building a strong brand. Your brand personality should resonate throughout your website using messaging and words your audience connects with.

Your logo, colours, and other elements of your brand identity must transfer to your website, which in itself is an important asset of your brand. Every colour, image and font should work together for a cohesive look and feel. If you don’t have brand guidelines to achieve this across your touchpoints creating a guide is a good start in defining the style of your website and overall brand assets.

Your overall design should appeal to your audience, but it must also showcase the professionalism of your business. Technology changes on a consistent basis, creating a timeless look that won’t be obsolete two years down the road. Digital users are very impatient, so you must be able to immediately capture their attention and keep it.

Use animation and other ‘jazzy’ items sparingly so it won’t slow down your website (speed being another hugely important performance metric of search engines). Your user should be able to have an immediate visual connection between you and the brand that not only resonates with them but creates front-of-mind recollection. This enhances the image and credibility of your brand from your logo, associated brand images, and more.

Content management

The thrust of your website comes from its content. Well crafted, on brand content draws your audience in and keeps them engaged. It supports your purpose and directs them to take action. This can be displayed in a variety of ways. You may have a blog or videos that take visitors through your brand story and show them what your products and services do.

Content is at the core of your website. Most people are unaware that while content is at the core, design and content are different elements of the overall structure of your website. Content is the material being consumed and design is the presentation of that content and influences how users feel. While aesthetics play a huge role in the user experience - users want to know what you can do for them.

Good content and search engine optimisation work hand in hand to give your site relevance and help with search engine ranking. Content-first and mobile-first work together to create a better user experience. Knowing how often you plan to update your content is important and having a content management system (CMS) built into the site can help in effective management. It should be secure to avoid hacking, easy to use and accessible by muliple users.

SEO & analytics

Good SEO helps direct users to your site to get the information they are looking for. It helps you with building a strong online presence and adds value to your design and objectives. If your website isn’t friendly to search engines, nobody will find it!

Skip on SEO and your website won’t rank and you’ll miss out on valuable customers who need the information you have shared. There are a few components to non technical SEO - the content, keywords, and links. Your content should have strategic keywords to help cut down on the time that search engines have to look for your page. Additionally, when using links effectively other credible sites will be directed to your content adding to your brand equity within search engines.

Your title tags and meta tags are all vital to enhancing your SEO and should be ingrained in the website build process from the very beginning. You can have a great website but if you don’t have visitors, what’s the point? Make sure you keep up with the search algorithm changes that Google makes to ensure your site is always present in SERPs (Search Engine Page Results).

Calls to action

You already know your website is there to provide information and direct users to do something. That “something” comes from the calls to action on the site. These calls to action are the next steps in the user journey, which could be a download button, click to call telephone number, request a quote link, or whatever is relevant within your website. Calls to action work to create conversions, should be plentiful and need to stand out!

Typography

This should be part of you overall branding application and deserves careful consideration. Modern web design welcomes unique typography because it can lead your users from one section to the next. It also demonstrates what type of brand you are. If your brand is playful but the typography is corporate and very serious, that’s a disconnect that will resonate with your audience. You also need to ensure that you’re using fonts that will show up on any computer and not just yours. Use web-standard fonts and follow best practice guidelines for the correct size.

Great hero images

They say a picture paints a thousand words. The images you use on your site should be meaningful and align with your objectives. Having a great visual experience that engages your users as they navigate through the site will keep them on the site much longer than they anticipated. Using text and other content along with those images can help tell a story, while providing the information visitors want or to point them in the right direction. Images are a reflection of your brand so avoid poor quality photography - perception is reality in the mind of a potential customer.

Perception is reality in the mind of a potential customer.

Hamburger menus

What’s a hamburger menu? You wouldn’t have an entire menu across the header on a mobile-first site, it wouldn’t fit! That’s where a well-designed hamburger menu comes in. It will help to increase conversion rates without taking up valuable screen space. All the user sees are three lines (which look like a hamburger) at the top of their screen and are conditioned to click it for more information. This helps the user focus on what’s important - use it well and keep it simple!

White space

White space helps your website design remain clutter-free by balancing all the design elements in a cohesive way. Users are drawn to sites that have a good use of white space simply because they can see everything clearly. Having the correct amount of white space between every element of content is good practice to bolster user satisfaction. The last thing you want is for a user to have trouble finding what they are interested in because there’s too much going on. The white space of your site helps the user focus on the things that matter most - solutions to their problems.

Speed

The speed of a website is so important that it can determine whether someone will continue through your site or disappear and visit your competition. Your site won’t drive conversions if you make your visitor wait.

That’s why it’s so important to optimise your site. Start by reducing the time users have between clicking and getting to your content - your images are key in this aspect. PNG images are better quality but are also larger than JPEG files. JPEGs offer a balance between quality and speed, so it’s a good idea to consider using JPEG files when building the site. Even better use SVG files for vector images such as graphics and logos and WEBP files for images - they'll knock an average of 40-50% off your file sizes.

The recommended size for website images depends on the image type, the website design and the device it will be viewed on. Below is a best practice guide that covers a few bases: 

• Hero image: 1280 x 720 pixels with a 16:9 aspect ratio 

• Website banner: 1200 x 400 pixels with a 3:1 aspect ratio 

• Blog image: 1200 x 800 pixels with a 3:2 aspect ratio 
 
• Logo: 400 x 100 pixels with a 4:1 aspect ratio 

• Background image: 1920 x 1080 pixels with a 16:9 aspect ratio 

• Desktop images: At least 1500 pixels on the longest edge 

• Mobile images: Resized by the browser, but 1500 pixels is enough to look good on high-PPI screens 

• Vertical images: Maximum height of 1200 pixels 



It's important to maintain the image's aspect ratio when resizing or cropping it to avoid stretching or distortion. Using heavy, unoptimised images can negatively impact the user experience and SEO strategy. 

The hosting of your site is also key. Check to see if your site is using shared hosting or dedicated hosting which could have a direct impact on your site. When selecting images and other items for your site, such as video, ask yourself, “Is this going to slow down my website?” If the answer is yes, or even maybe, don’t use it.

Footers

Your website footer is important but often overlooked. Most people don’t take the time to scroll all the way to the bottom, but if they do they’re no doubt used to seeing information such as a privacy policy, terms and conditions, copyrights or career-oriented information.

A website footer is a good place to display your social media channels to create another great opportunity to engage with your user and add additional value to their experience. Don’t forget your logo and contact details just in case they missed them!

As a guide, try and included the below elements in your footer:

• Logo
• Navigation
• Contact details
• Company information
• Copyright
• Terms of service
• Privacy policy
• Call-to-action
• Support information
• Security and certification logos

To sum up

Albeit the tip of the iceberg, considering these key elements to good website design is essential and will play a huge part in your online success story. Now all you need is a website designer in place to help you create a website that works! The team here at NOVA have heaps of experience in website design, build and optimisation. You won’t have to worry about SEO or securing a domain, hosting, reporting or analytics either because we can do it all for you. Our team can even help you promote your site through email marketing or Pay Per Click.

Need a little help or advice?