Websites come in all forms and shapes, from text to multimedia like photos, videos and audio files.
Web designers must carefully balance the visual components of a website to achieve both functionality and beauty. Web-Adelaide website design Adelaide involves selecting which aesthetic features should stand out through colour, size or letter spacing.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is the art of determining what makes something pleasing or beautiful. It makes aesthetics an integral component of website design, ensuring visitors stay on your content instead of leaving within seconds. Achieve beautiful aesthetics on a website by employing colour, shape and texture elements as aesthetic solutions.
Web designers use aesthetic principles to craft harmonious website layouts. If there is one element on your site you want to call attention to, bright colours or animation could draw it out further. White space also balances visual elements and guides visitor movement throughout a site.
Aesthetic judgments can be determined by many factors, including senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences and values, subconscious behaviour training decisions, instincts, and sociological institutions. Some aesthetic judgments, such as the beauty of a woman’s face or the arrangement of flowers, seem universal across cultures, regardless of differences in customs, education, wealth, and religion. Others, such as certain harmonies and intervals of music, may also be widely held to be beautiful by all humans.
Functionality
Web-Adelaide website design Adelaide encompasses more than aesthetics – it requires practical considerations as well. To design a functional, usable and accessible site takes technical know-how in areas like programming and front-end development as well as graphic and image editing software such as Photoshop, Sketch or Figma; depending on the complexity of a project’s scope, web designers may need to create wireframes and user flows before beginning work on its execution.
Website layout and design should work to efficiently communicate its content in an easily understandable manner by creating a visual hierarchy for every page that can be achieved with text and graphics, font size/spacing/colour contrast. A website’s design must remain consistent with its overall branding strategy while all pages remain easy to navigate.
Navigation
Website navigation is an integral component of the overall design. While it’s tempting to experiment and take risks with your navigation layout, it must remain user-friendly and follow a standard format.
Web-Adelaide website design Adelaide navigation should always be easily visible and accessible on every page of your website, not only the home page. Add links to your main navigation options in the footer, or use sidebar menus on either side to achieve this. A footer menu is especially beneficial on pages with long content as it allows visitors who scroll down the page to access important info and content quickly and efficiently.
Please limit the number of navigation items to seven or fewer to ensure they’re easy for visitors to process. Offering dropdown menus with subcategories makes finding what visitors are searching for easier; offering breadcrumbs helps orientate them on your website.
Use the primacy effect, in which items at the beginning of a list are more easily remembered, and the recency effect states that items nearer the end (i.e., those that happened most recently) will have more lasting impressions on people’s memories.
SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques can be an excellent way of getting more eyes on your content, whether selling products, booking clients or raising brand loyalty and awareness. SEO works hand in hand with website design, ensuring pages on your site are accessible for visitors to navigate while providing relevant answers for user searches.
SEO is an ongoing process and must constantly evolve as users’ search habits shift. Search engines such as Google continually revise their guidelines to provide relevant results for every search query; however, the fundamental principles of website design remain unchanged.
Slow-loading websites frustrate visitors and could prompt them to leave quickly, sending a negative signal to search engine algorithms. Optimising media and using image resizer tools are two simple solutions to ensure your website loads at an acceptable speed.
Additionally, web accessibility standards are vital in SEO because they directly affect a site’s user experience. For instance, providing descriptive alt text for images helps facilitate reading for those using assistive technologies like screen readers. Creating a colour scheme with sufficient contrast between font and background colours also assists users with visual impairments when digesting your content.