Web Design and Usability: 9 Essential Guidelines and Best Practices

Guideline, Creativity and website design tips: the best websites should go side by side if you want to have an amazing website. As a website designer, your main focus is to develop a professionally well-structured yet engaging website to increase the user web experience. You can’t neglect these two fundamental parameters while working on a website design.  

If any of the ones above are not taken seriously, the whole concept of website designing loses its authenticity. Let’s suppose your website looks very pleasing to enhance the user web experience, this needs web design best practices. Still, the features and options in it are so difficult to understand and find that the users get confused when they open your site. In this case, you must include usability and easy accessibility for your users. Think of the users you are designing the website for a while, adding minor pieces to the site, and think of how many people will enjoy interacting with your website and what their user experience will be. 

A well-structured website always fulfills its functions and portrays its basic idea while engaging the visitor. Several factors need to be kept in mind while designing the website as per user web preferences, such as consistency, colors, typography, imagery, simplicity, and functionality, which contribute to good website design.

We’ve gathered a list of 9 fundamental guidelines, tips and web design best practices you can apply to your next website design. 

Website’s Concept

The first fundamental aspect of having an exceptional website is to have a clear mind and concept of the website requirements of what purpose it is designed for. That means the purpose of that website and the actual agenda should be the priority of any website. The website should have a clear and simple concept to portray its purpose.

Let’s suppose you are creating a website for an art gallery but lacked to include or portray the basic idea of art through it, which can make it worse for users. Your website is the foremost or first thing to create a connection between you and your user, so make sure that it builds a strong connection rather than confusing them.  

Simplicity

The best website doesn’t mean to include unnecessary graphics, animations, and colors, but to enhance the user experience, your website should be simple while presenting the complete scope of its development. Suppose it’s a basic information-based website or any contact-related website. In that case, that should be designed to simply benefit the user because all they want to know is the piece of information or the complete a basic task. 

Therefore, excessive design elements will only disturb the users and make it more complicated for them to accomplish what they’re trying to execute.

Navigability

The importance of navigation in website development should be focused. Your users or visitors should clearly know where they have to click next when they land on your site. All the features, pages, and options in your point should be easily accessible to your visitors. Make sure they don’t have to find the particular page on your website.

Consistency

To have a great navigation experience, make sure that the overall website’s design is consistent. All the pages, backgrounds, header, footer, font style, font size, and structuring should be consistent with impacting on user’s usability. 

VISUAL HIERARCHY

Visual hierarchy is how beautifully to align all the elements of a website in order of its use, importance, and accessibility. It is done by structuring the size, images, spaces, font styling, colors, style, etc to set the good design example. 

Content

Content is the most crucial factor in increasing the user experience. As Google loves unique content, so do people who love engaging content. With the importance of great website design, it is very important that the website content is up to mark. Content is the best approach to convert your users into customers by giving them all the relevant information and engaging them to increase their trust.

Responsiveness 

A Responsive website is a key to enhancing the user experience. Most people prefer to search or navigate everything on their mobile phones now. And it’s very important that your website works properly on mobile phones and all the other devices as well. After creating your website, make sure to make it responsive or mobile-friendly as its the most important web design guidelines. 

Load Time

Slow websites increase the bounce rate. Making your users wait will result in losing the lead. Users want to have their website loaded in a minimum of 2 seconds. So try to increase or work on the load time of your website by removing unnecessary graphics and plugins to have the best practices for website design. You can compress the image’s size without compromising the picture’s quality. 

SEO

If you follow the Google guidelines of SEO to build your website, the results lead you to have a great user web as Google ranks all those sites who has all the qualities that a preferred by users as well. So if you make Google happy by following the SEO aspects, your users will be satisfied too. And not only this, you will get organic leads by following SEO techniques. 

Conclusion:

We are sure that by following the given 9 website design best practices and tips for exceptional user web design and usability, you will achieve your website development target. Do remember these points while designing your or your client’s websites.