Having a well-designed website is crucial to capturing and maintaining the attention of your visitors. There are many things that go into a good website and many principles you can apply to get the most out of your design. However, some of these are more timeless than others. We are going to look at the most important ones as suggested by BCT Web Design.

Keep everything Simple

With any piece of design, there is always that temptation to add more and more bells and whistles. This isn’t always a good idea. You should try to make things as simple as possible in your design. When you add too many elements to your website pages then you might end up distracting your visitors from the content that really matters. On the other hand, a simple and minimalistic website is not only easy to use navigate but also visually appealing. Moreover, a website with too many design features may take too long to load, which can be frustrating for the visitor.

Maintain Consistency

Whatever design you settle on for your website, you should keep things consistent throughout. Elements like buttons, headings, subheadings, font properties, and others should be consistent throughout the website. This helps to keep your website looking professional and appealing to your visitors.

Make your Content Readable

Whatever else you do with your website design, you should ensure that the information presented on it is readable to your visitors. This readability will not only give your visitors a seamless experience but will also help your SEO. Go for typography that is legible to your readers and make good use of headlines, bullet points, whitespace, and other elements to make your content readable.

Make your Content compatible with Mobile Phones

More and more people every year are accessing their favorite websites on their mobile phones. In some industries, as much as 70% of all traffic can come from mobile. This is too large a market to ignore. You should, therefore, optimize your webpages for appealing presentation on smartphones, tablets, and the new wave of phablet screens. A responsive website is no longer just an advantage: it is a requirement to boosting your online presence.

Your Website should Load quickly

No one enjoys having to wait for a website to load. Make sure your website loads quickly by combining your CSS into a single CSS file and your Javascript into a single Javascript file. Minify your code so that it loads faster and optimize image sizes.

Choose your Color Palette and Imagery Wisely

The color combination you pick for your website will determine how well you attract and keep the visitors who come to your site. Your color combination should be relevant to the website theme and also create a pleasant atmosphere for your visitors. It should also give your website a well-balanced look. Don’t use too many colors as your web pages will then begin to look noisy. You should also not use too many vibrant images.

Make Navigation Easy

When visitors can easily navigate between pages on your website, then they are more likely to stay for longer. Use well thought out page hierarchies, bread crumbs, and clickable buttons to make it easy for users to get to the pages they need to in the fewest number of clicks.