Web design has come a long way since the time it first made its appearance on the scene. The rapid advancement in designing technologies and methodologies and the rising maturity of designers has meant that websites today are a coming together of some amazing visuals and fantastic functional appeal. But what has not changed over the years is the ‘hit and miss’ nature of web design. Some designers are still not sure whether a website they are designing will go on to deliver the returns their owners are looking for.
But this usually happens because they are getting their designing choices wrong or to put it more specifically, not focusing on designing aspects that they should be focusing on. So let’s take a look at what designers need to do to hit the bulls-eye every single time.
1. Use Emotive Imagery
Web Designer Depot has a nice article on this topic ‘How to Build Irresistible Websites by Designing for Emotion‘ and I suggest you go through it. One of the better ways of designing such websites is to pick the right images; these are the kind of images that get a particular emotion out of people, whether its passion, envy, desire or something else. This emotion helps your website deliver its message with impact. A site like KFC does this amazingly well. The images make you want what those people in the images are having. It is hunger mixed with envy and desire. As can be imagined, this is the impact that the brand wants the website and its images to deliver and the website doesn’t disappoint.
“This is just one example of how websites have scored by bringing emotive appeal into play; as a designer if you can bake emotions in your design, there is very little chance the design will go wrong.
2. Using Color the Right Way
Do you know colors affect purchases? In website design, the importance of the right use of colors cannot be emphasized enough. Unfortunately, some website designers are prone to seeing color purely as a decorative element and not a design element. For such designers a crash course on color theory and its implementation in design is a good idea. The use of the right color scheme, achieving color vibrancy and leveraging contrast are just some of the things that will help you maximize the potential of color to not only impress the users but also deliver the results you are looking for.
3. Minimalist Design
Firstly, there is a different between simplistic design and minimalistic design. The former is dumbing down the design, while the latter is doing more with less. What you are aiming for is a website design that has minimal design elements and still packs a punch. As can be imagined, this isn’t easy and requires a rare degree of web designing experience and expertise to bring such designs to life. But it can be done, and it needs to be done because it leaves very little scope for mistakes to happen. If you are stripping a website of its design elements and using only those that are absolutely essential to carry home the website’s message, you are getting rid of the complexities related to web design. This keeps errors at a bare minimum.
