The primary benefit of opting for custom web design is you have complete control over the development process. You can control every minute detail that will help your business stand out in the ever-growing competitive landscape.
When you hire a custom web design company to develop a website for you, what design principles should you follow? While this varies from company to company, a few design principles hold true for every organization. In this article, learn about the essentials to a stellar custom web design.
Make the Website Reflect Your Brand
When designing your website, you should visualize the end product as the extension of your brand. So the website should reflect your brand, your purpose, your vision, and your statement.
This is important for marketing and communication purposes. As soon as people land on your website and interact with it, they should get an idea of what your business does.
For example, if you’re in the healthcare business, you can include more green elements along with red crosses. This design will make it clearer for the visitors that you’re in the healthcare industry.
You should choose the colors and overall design accordingly so that it represents your brand.
Make the Navbar Intuitive
You’d have information scattered throughout your website in the form of pages. Whenever someone visits your website, you must make it easier for them to jump from one page to another. And navbar is the first place they turn back to when thinking about visiting other pages.
Your navbar should have these qualities:
- Brief
- Simple
- Consistent
- Noticeable
- Helpful
The navbar should be brief and minimal, with four to five primary options and fewer drop-down options. It should also be noticeable so that visitors can easily notice it. It’d be more than helpful if you can include a search bar right at the top.
With a proper navbar in place, your customers will find the information they’re looking for easily.
Focus on a Mobile-first Design
Mobile phones already generate more than half of the internet traffic as per the latest stats from Statista. And that excludes tablet traffic. So if your website is not optimized for mobile devices, the potential customers may ignore you and move on to the next website.
Because of this reason, Google is giving a lower ranking to websites that are not mobile optimized. So when custom designing your website, you ought to think about mobile users. It’s imperative that you use technologies like Bootstrap that’ll make the website responsive.
Use Contrasting Colors
You must use colors throughout your website to make it look more appealing. But the main question is how your coloring scheme should be.
Ideally, you should use contrasting colors. So if your background is white, then the text should be black, brown, grey, or any dark color. This would make the text more legible for the readers.
You should adopt a similar coloring scheme for the rest of your website and for the graphics too.
Leverage Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful indicator that influences buying decisions. When people see that other people have benefited from your product or service, they’re more likely to buy your product. Therefore, you must leverage social proof wherever possible.
Since you’re custom designing your website, you have the flexibility of including them at the top or the bottom of the home page. By placing them at the top, you can create an instant impression. But if you don’t want to be pushy, you can include them towards the end of the page. The decision lies with you.
Depending on how you plan and execute your web design activity, you can end up paying less for the website. The agency will only include those pages and elements that you have requested for. But the main benefit of working with a custom web design company is the distinctiveness and uniqueness your website will possess after it’s complete.
