Being up to date with the emerging web design trends and techniques is vital for you and whichever creative designer you are appointing.
To start off, find a competent web designer who does not only have the required technical skills. He has to be familiar the current online publishing web design trends, the UX and UI that are promoted by the browsers, search engines and favoured by the fickle public. He should be up to date with current design can make one adopt trends before the rest of your competition. As a result, your web designer should be able to deliver your website within a shorter time, and still set your website apart from the crowd in terms of uniqueness, search engine optimised ranking and converting visitors into actionable leads.
Here are some essential web design tips for the success of your website.
Use Style Guides
Style guidelines are famous in publishing work. Media publications use large format books or documents to maintain uniformity in their content. Style guidelines can be, for example, the labelling of countries or a sequence in numbering. Web designers can ensure consistency in the sites they design by creating unique style guides. Style guidelines are especially useful to designers working jointly with others who are far away to help unify their efforts. An excellent example of a well-written style guide is Google’s Material Design.
Do Away With Sidebars If They Are Not Absolutely Necessary
The sidebar is used to improve a site’s usability by providing additional navigational elements, for instance, favourite content and recent post’s links. However, they tend to clutter the visual layout of web pages. Additionally, sidebars are currently used by marketers for promotional uses and offer little user experience thus, their significance to users has significantly dropped according to Conversion XL’s heatmap tests. Your content should be given prominence by use of designs that help focus users’ attention. If you have to use sidebars, you should use themes that allows full-width content publishing.
Have An Idea About Your Design Beforehand
Strive to have your design before going to the code editor.
If you create your designs on the screen and then edit them later, you should try a different style year after year. Draft an offline sketch of your design on a paper using a pencil or on a whiteboard. Doing this will help you get a clear picture of where specific elements will fit within your plan. Additionally, you can use various web hosting design prototyping tools to help you visualise your ideas before development.
Use Large Fonts
An important facet of a great website design service in Singapore is the use of large fonts helps grab the attention of the readers. Big typography enhances readability on small screens and is compatible with flat and minimalist designs trends. Your focus should be on settling on a web-friendly typeface and not its size.
Create More Space
Cluttering can distract readers’ attention which is why it is advisable to do away with sidebars. Creating more whitespace or negative space within your website creates more appealing designs which enable users to concentrate on what is essential.
Responsive Design Is Compulsory
Your website must be mobile-friendly due to the increasing use of mobile phones to access websites. Commit to develop mobile-first web designs including fluid layout, mobile-optimised images, and hamburger menus among others.
Use Google’s Material Design
In 2014, Google heightened the use of Material Design philosophy which saw digital designers adopt the same. You should transit from using the traditional flat web design to the modern material design styles to enjoy capabilities such as the creation of beautiful shadows to add depth and style into an element using layers.
Do a Toolkit Re-evaluation And Expansion
Conduct research to establish if there are new tools that can help you enhance efficiency and make your work more enjoyable. You can use new apps such as Pixate and updates such as Adobe CC in web design.
Simplify Navigation
Placing too many links in your navigation bar can have negative impacts including visitors leaving your site for such links. Place few links on your navigation bar for more appealing designs that optimise conversion rate and improve the user experience.
Use High-Quality Images
Use high-quality images in designing your web pages by investing in a premier stock image service to differentiate your service and help achieve your objectives. Alternatively, you can create quality images through photography, drawing, or combining the two.
Do Away With Sliders
Do away with sliders in your website to simplify navigation and reduce distraction to users. Sliders are less often used and present users with lots of options to leave your page. Use big typography and uniquely designed large header space to enhance the appeal of static images and remove the need for sliders.
Learn A/B Testing
Use A/B testing to evaluate the working of your designs since there is no guarantee that most of these tips will work for all sites since they are based on current trends in website development. There might be conventional ways of designing that might prove useful to your case. Use split testing to support your views when negotiating recommendations with clients.
Take Advantage of Visual Hierarchy
Every page on the website has a visual hierarchy. What is a visual hierarchy? Simply put, this refers to the arrangement, color, size, and contrast of visual elements. It plays a critical role in determining the relative prominence as well as the order in which the website visitors see the various elements.
Professional web designers in Singapore use visual hierarchy to guide website visitor attention to the most critical elements on the website first. The essential aspects of the website layout are visuals, colour contrast and the positioning (low or high on the page).
Combining the aspects and ensuring that they work best for your website will multiply their positive effect. Very few website visitors will see low contrast text that is surrounded by images, but a majority of visitors will see a large video placed at a conspicuous location on the page.
Concisely, visual hierarchy is the underlying reason why your eyes follow a particular path or sequence on every website page you visit on the web today. You can leverage it to guide potential customers to a specific call to action.
Include a Descriptive, Keyphrase-Focused Headline on the Homepage
The headline on top of your website homepage as well on every page should be as descriptive as possible. It should help the visitor know that they are in the right place. Otherwise, they will close the tab and start looking for alternative service/product providers.
The headline provides an excellent opportunity to use the high-value keyword phrase you are targeting and indicate the relevance to the audience. One of the mistakes that most people make is writing a clever or vague headline. Statistics show that clear headlines that have the keyword phrase perform better than clever website headlines.
The point is, instead of writing a fancy but vague homepage headline; strive to write a descriptive headline — something that will give the audience an idea about your brand and what it offers even before they proceed to read the content.
The Fold Still Matters in Singapore Website Design Landscape
For every website visit on your computer or smartphone device, there is a viewable area that professional website designers in Singapore try to capitalize on to increase conversion rate. At the bottom of this section is famous and widely talked about the fold. The website visitors have to scroll down to see visuals or any other content that is posted in this part of the website.
Because Singapore has the highest smartphone penetration and a majority of internet users prefer using these devices to browse websites, expect your site to be viewed on thousands of different screen sizes. Every website visit has a fold, and there is an average fold for all website visits. Tools such as Hotjar can help you to identify this section of your website.
Recent research shows that 80% of website visitors spend most of their time above the fold. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to make sure that the most critical information about your business is placed above the fold.
Avoid Placing All Call-to-Action (CTAs) at the Top
Ensuring that all the valuable information about your brand is above the fold of your website does not make it right to place all your CTAs in this section. Do not assume that because a majority of your site visitors spend more time there means they are ready to convert or take the desired action.
A lot of the persuasion takes place down the page. Chartbeat analysed more than 25 million website visits and found out that even though most of the engagement takes below the fold of most websites. This statistics means that even though the content displayed at the top section of your site is essential, it is not the ideal place to put call-to-actions.
Therefore, make sure that your call to actions are strategically placed down the website pages, in a position where the interest or attention of the potential customers is still high.
Make the Website Pages Longer
Making the website pages longer will give you more space to address the potential customers’ questions comprehensively. You will also have ample time to address questions and concerns by not only explaining how your product or service works but also using supportive evidence.
If a prospect does not find the answer at the top, they will scroll down the page to look for additional information. As you create this content and determine the size of each page, keep in mind that the most effective sales page emulates real-life sales conversations/discussions.
Of course, you would never cut a potential customer off during a sales meeting or stop answering their questions, would you? That is precisely what short pages do; they either stop answering questions or do not offer enough information to convince the prospect to convert. Besides, research shows a longer page that is packed with valuable information that the target customers are looking for can increase the conversion rate by more than 30%.
Display One Thing at a Time
Most businesses try to emulate new sites such as Apple’s website as it is clean and looks advanced. Low visual complexity always wins in the competitive Singapore online business space. A research done by Google in 2012 to identify websites that are perceived as beautiful by visitors revealed that complex website designs are less likely to be viewed as attractive by users.
This is one of the revelations that fuel the trend towards tall page and single column layouts in not only Singapore but also other parts of the world. Multiple column layouts (content area, right rail, left side navigation) are involved, difficult to navigate, and the excess visual elements within the users’ field of vision often discourage them from taking the desired action.
The bottom line that, you should cut the clutter and make two or one elements the main focus points at each scroll depth.
To maximise your visitors’ experience in your website, you should continuously learn about and adapt to new methods because trends shift extremely quickly on the Internet. We hope that these web design tips may inspire you to reconsider your website design strategies.
