When you open a website, the first thing that catches your attention is the interface and the visuals. A website with the right mix of visuals keeps you engaged. It also appears more professional, and convinces the customer enough to make a purchase!
That’s how powerful web design can be!
If you want to know about web design and the areas within it, we are here to help you out with our detailed guide on web design. We will take you through the stages within web design so you can use it for your own website!
But before we get into its elements, let’s explore what it is.
What is Web Design?
Web design is what creates the visual aesthetics and appeal of a website. The colors, layout, fonts, everything the user sees, come under web design. Web design is more focused upon what the user perceives and how he navigates through your site.
Web design stresses upon user experience and aims to make it smooth, fast, and convenient.
Who is a Web Designer?
Web designers are professionals who are skilled at graphic designing, UI and UX design, marketing, website color palettes, typography, etc.
They know how to effectively add CTA’s (call to actions), storyboards and wireframes to a site . While you can design your own website, learning all these skills yourself can be tough and time-consuming thus, to save time you can consider outsourcing to a company abroad.
Outsourcing web design Bahrain, UAE, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Philippines, etc. can be a great idea.
These countries offer great quality web services at the best prices. Among the Gulf States, companies like Go Gulf, Emirates Graphic, and ELEKS are very popular for their professional products and great services.
6 Stages of Website Design
Below are the 6 major areas of web design that you should know about.
1. Website builders and designers
Popular website builders include square space, Wix, WordPress, Shopify, etc. These platforms allow you to develop your website without the need to learn to code. They offer templates, color schemes that are ready to use!
On the other hand, if you want special functionality, colors, and layout for your website that no one else has used before and want everything to be exactly the way you need it, then you can hire a developer. Developers know front-end and back-end coding and programming in languages like HTML, Javascript, PHP, etc.
With programming skills, they can build pages, databases, custom layouts, and color schemes along with functionality to make your website design amarillo exactly the way you want it.
2. User experience (UX)
All your efforts and hard work are for the user at the end of the day. If a user isn’t satisfied and the website isn’t relevant to him, all your work will go in vain. That is where User Experience (UX) design comes in. UX design focuses on how the user feels, reacts, and perceives your web pages.
To make sure you keep your users happy you will need to know your target audience and what they like. With that information, you can design a site that will appeal to them. Thus, make sure you know your target audience and what they prefer.
3. Visuals
When someone opens your website they see certain colors, fonts, shapes, and icons. These visual elements have a huge impact on the visitor. If these elements are used wisely they can make the visitor curious about your brand.
For the best fonts, you can find tools online like the Canva Font Combinator. With that, you can find the right font for your website.
Another thing to consider are colors. While it seems like a matter of choice and preference, it’s a very crucial decision.
Certain colors convey certain meanings like red symbolizes power and strength, blue signals loyalty and stability, Orange is for fun and excitement, so on and so forth. Thus, consider these small design elements as you work on the website.
4. Functionality
Every website on the World Wide Web comes with a purpose. Some offer products that you can shop for, some offer articles to read while some offer socializing, etc. Depending on the purpose and aim of the website, choose a design to assist the customer in performing that action.
Product pages, payment options, forms, sign-up buttons, CTAs, etc. All these are functionalities. Which functionalities are ideal for you will depend on the nature of your business. Thus, as you are designing your website, add the right functionality that fulfills your brand goals.
5. The content
When you open a website, you see pages like “About Us”, “Home”, “Services”, etc. These pages have content like pictures, videos, text, Gifs, etc. To make sure your site visitors are pleased with their experience, you need to make sure the content is good, optimized, up-to-date, and presented well.
While the developer will design these pages for you, you will need to provide him with the content and it needs to be good. Imagine if a visitor comes to your site to buy a product. If he sees that the product description is vague and the images are blurred, he will lose interest in your brand.
Thus, content is a key part of web design that you need to work on.
6. Testing
After you have worked on the above elements, you need to go through a final phase which is testing. While you may think your site is easy to navigate and understand, it might not be true for the user. Thus to make sure everything is working well for the visitor, you will need to test your website.
During the testing phase, you will see if your website is optimum, all the functionality is working well, and whether the site works well on all devices or not.
Conclusion
In this article, we went through an overview of web design and its elements.
Web design is related to the visual appearance of your website. The colors, images, content, and fonts that appear on a website are essential parts of it.
To start working on your website design, you can either use templates from website builders or hire a developer to design the website for you.
Then you need to work on your user data to make sure the design is according to their liking. Using the data, you should work on your content, functionality, and visuals to attract customers through aesthetic appeal.
Lastly, to see if your website is working on different devices and appearing correctly to the audience you should test it before it goes live.
While the above points are just an overview of the topic, we recommend you dive deeper into the topic to get an even better understanding.
