General Principles for Good Website Design

Designing a good website is often challenging and hard. There may be billions and billions of websites out there only a few thousand of them are mostly good websites. People spend a lot of time on the internet for shopping, ordering food online, exploring their university websites, reading articles from different websites and many more. You can make a user’s day bad just by designing a bad website. It’s time to change. If you are on the verge of designing a website or already have a website and thinking to update your crappy website, this article is totally for you. Don’t worry I got you. I was sailing on the same boat too. So throughout the tutorial, I want you guys to follow two big quotes regarding design.

How to design a good website?

Well, good website design often comes from different expert areas. It’s not a one-step process, you can never design good websites from shortcut steps. After taking a graduate class named “Human-Computer Communication” we had a long discussion in the class after which we came up with the 9 general principles with the help of which you can improve or design good websites (It’s like a formula of design). We should always focus on these key aspects i.e. Usability and User Experience for designing a website. Follow the below discussed 9 general principles and make your websites usable, aesthetic, friendly, engaging to use.

1. Easy Navigation

This is one of the most important features or a principle that you must keep in mind and implement while you are designing a website. According to the survey conducted by Clutch, they found that “Almost everyone (94%) says easy navigation is the most important website feature”. It’s true because if your site is hard to navigate, nothings easily available in the first place, then things might not go smoothly. Easy navigation includes a simple menu layout and the ability to quickly and reliably move through sites. Don’t worry I have some tips for easy website navigation.

  • Keep the navigation bar as simple as possible with minimal options
  • Mitigate the drop-down menu options
  • Follow real-world conventions or use the user’s language for naming the options. Don’t use jargons
  • Avoid too many clicks inside the website

Motivate, learn and teach yourself how to implement the above tips by looking at some of the best websites available out there. For example, Gmail — Google. I will use the same example in most of this tutorial. Because why not it’s one of the best website/application on the planet.

2. Responsive design

First, let’s get the basics ready. Responsive design means the design of a website/webpage that fits well with all the smartphones, computers, laptops or any display devices irrespective of their aspect ratios. An aspect ratio is the height and width of a display device. Every user today wants a mobile version of the website. It is the duty of the designer not only to design the website for a bigger screen but also focus on the smaller screens too. The website should not work only for a specific iPhone, Blackberry (if that’s a thing today), Samsung and One Plus phones. The design should fit every single smartphone available in the market. Well, if not every smartphone, at least try to. Some tips for responsive design are:

  • Optimize the images
  • Ensure buttons can be easily clicked on smaller screens
  • Create several prototypes
  • Consider a Mobile-first design approach

3. Same Color Scheme (Consistency)

When defining knowledge hierarchy through the websites, color is very important. Users should be able to skim through pages understand what they are about. Keeping the coloring scheme consistent is one of the hardest tasks on the planet. Sometimes the color which we like might not be liked by others. There is often a tradeoff between colors. Make sure that the color you choose is well-liked by others. Some colors might fit well to a certain text and some might not, so maintaining consistency is the key role here. Run a survey, test, and iterate until you get good feedback from the users. Also, the color scheme on your website must be consistent. Don’t do a combo of colors. That’s a bad idea. Below is the chart of the psychology of choosing colors.

Leave a Reply