We all know that website design is an important, but sometime we disregard of the importance of this design that it greatly affects the conversion of your site to profit. You may have the greatest article, contents and spend great amount resources on boosting its conversion but, If your website looks awful it will just go all to waste.

Just remember that design is not just for developers. Your website design is also a form of marketing. Website design is your product packaging. The more you understand about web design the better result, you may achieve.

Here are the Web Design Principles you Should Know

 

1.   Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is a key principle in web design. It is the order where the human eye perceives what it sees. There are parts of your website that are more important than others, and you want those to get more attention than the less important parts. You want your visitors to click and take a look at those parts that matters. So you need to make them more eye catching and prominent.

2.     Fitt’s Law

In this principle, it states that the time required to move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. So it means, the bigger the object the closer it is to us, the easier it is to use.

This law doesn’t mean that bigger is always better. An oversize button in not a pleasant thing to see. The size of a button should be equal or proportioned with the frequency it is being used or clicked. You can check which button is frequently being clicked so you can adjust which one can be resized for much easier access.

3.     Rules of Third

Using an image is a good idea for your website. It gives the idea about your site visually much faster than text.

Images should follow the rules of third which states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

4.     Gestalt Design Laws

Gestalt Design or Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain. It states that our eye sees an object or photo entirely before looking to the other individual parts.

The idea behind this is that people see your whole site first, before they can distinguish the menus, headers, buttons, footers and etc.

There are some so called gestalt designs; I’ll just tackle them a little for you to understand.

  • Law of Proximity
    People tend to group together things that are closer in space. This also applies to web design you need to make sure that the important things are not close together or else they will be perceived as one.
  • Law of Similarity
    People also tend to similar things together. The similarity can be classified as form or shape, color, shading and other qualities.
  • Law of Closure
    We seek completeness. With shapes that aren’t closed, when parts of a whole picture are missing, our perception fills in the visual gap.
  • Law of Symmetry
    The mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point. It is perceptually pleasing to be able to divide objects into an even number of symmetrical parts.

5.     White Space and Clean Design

White space is the portion of the page left empty. It’s is the space between images, margins, gutter, spaces between the lines literally everything that are not occupied by text or images.

It should not be considered merely ‘blank’ space — it is an important element of design. It enables the objects in it to exist at all. White space is all about the use of hierarchy. The hierarchy of information, color or images.

A page without white space looks cluttered, crowded and it gives the site visitors a hard time the text at all. This is the main concept in a simplistic website design.

Enough white space gives your website a clean and sleek look. White space design makes your site more appealing and giving out the a clearer message to the site visitors. It may look like it has less content, but clean design means a design that makes the best use of the space it is in.