With the New Year fast approaching, we can look forward to an onslaught of design and technology predictions when it comes to web design in an attempt to help our websites gain more prowess in the marketplace.
The interesting thing, today, is that your website is no longer a flat digital artifact that combines text, images and video on a computer screen; to build a website today you have to consider the mobile experience much more, and factor in the need for a more interactive and engaging experience that leverages technologies such as artificial intelligence to power chatbots and the like.
That said, there are still a few solid principles of building a website that ring true for 2019 which aren’t focused on gimmicks or design fads. In this article we’re going to look at the core tenants of making a website:
SPEED
You want your website to load very quickly, as load times are important given the short attention span most online users have. In fact, research demonstrates that if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, they will click off your site.
Therefore, don’t underestimate the power of load speed and make sure you use tools like Pingdom to assess your website’s performance in terms of speed and remedy any issues.
CONTENT ARCHITECTURE
The content architecture of your website is always going to remain critical to user experience, as just like a supermarket, you want to arrange things so that they are easy to find. In this sense, you need to consider the structure and layout of your content, whilst ensuring clear navigation that makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for. This is why it’s important to carry out user testing.
AESTHETICS
The visual design of your website is important, though it’s not the be all and end all. That said, if you have an ugly and distracting design, it will put people off, so you want to consider the most appealing design for the majority of users – rather than your own subjective taste.
You want to make sure the design compliments your content rather than overpowers it, like herbs within a recipe, as the core ingredients (i.e. your content) should be what the user consumes rather than being overpowered by the design.
BROWSER COMPATIBILITY
You want to ensure that your website works on all browsers, and looks the same on all browsers, as just because it looks good in Safari, for instance, doesn’t mean it will look good in Internet Explorer or Chrome. It’s therefore a good idea to test your website in all browsers and on a variety of screen sizes.
VIEWPORTS
Today, a lot of people will be accessing your site on a mobile device. Whilst you could develop an app, many website owners prefer to create a responsive website that adapts to the viewport (screen size of the device the user is viewing the website on).
If you are new to responsive design, you might want to google the term “breakpoints and viewports” to get to grips with the basics of responsive design. The good news, however, is that most WordPress templates, for instance, are naturally built to be responsive so this isn’t something you need to worry about too much – as it will have already been done for you.