Category: Design

Web design is a complex and often underestimated part of any web development project, whether it’s an informational website or an ecommerce store.

Many novices do not put much thought into the design of a website. But good web design not only attracts more visitors to a website but also raises the website’s importance and credibility.

A poorly-designed website, on the other hand, diminishes its purpose and serves no good to the business. Good web designs come from well-thought-out page layouts, carefully-picked colors and typefaces, and well-structured unique content.

This logical process is often called the psychology of web design. Many web designers design their websites by employing psychological concepts in their designs to influence their customers.

Color

Choosing a website color is one of the essential parts of web design. Color is a strong tool that has a great impact on the website’s visitors. The colors that web designers choose help to set up the customers’ emotions and mood towards a website. There are thousands of colors and therefore millions of color combinations. Each color has a different emotional impact on a human being and thus has a different purpose of use.

For example, blue is often used by banks and social networks on their websites because most people associate blue with certain feelings such as trust, calmness, and loyalty.

Red, on the other hand, displays power, importance, and energy. Many websites often use red to grab the attention of the customers or highlight the importance of something on a web page.

Clearly, every color has its own psychological effect on a human being. Web developers and designers should always choose the colors for a website based on the message that they are trying to convey.

Page layout

Page layout also has a significant role in the process of web design. The design of the page layout involves organization and arrangement of visual elements and text on a web page.
Web designers can use the psychological patterns of human behavior in order to better communicate the main ideas of a website to its visitors. After all, it’s the page layout of a website that will guide its visitors.

Hence, web designers need to establish elements on web pages that lead the reader’s eyes guiding them to the key element and message. For example, focus on attention-grabbing titles on web pages, call to action buttons, link, and buttons.

Research has shown that visitors on websites tend to look at a web page from top left to right, up and down, in a “Z” like pattern. This means that web designers should place important information at the top left, middle, and bottom right parts of the web page as these are the most common places where the visitors will look.

Another example of how human psychology can be utilized in the design of a page layout is the use of blank space on the web page. Most people do not like to look at large blocks of text. Space should be used to create a visual break for the visitors. Any top web designer will have mastered this art, and get this part checked off during the design process.

Different places throughout a web page have a different influence on a customer and need to be placed accordingly. Positioning the most important information in the areas that have a stronger influence on people increases the bounce rate and visitor retention.

Typeface

A typeface is a group of several fonts that are similar in design. These are an essential part of the psychology of web design and can evoke emotions and feelings, as well as set up the tone for the text.

Typefaces vary in size, shape, design, as well as purpose. There are thousands of typefaces and each one is designed to be used for particular situations and to spark a certain feeling.

For instance, Serif typeface has a history of being mostly used in professional fields of work, like law firms, news websites, and schools. For this reason, many people associate the Serif fonts with professionalism, thus using Serif fonts on a website would create a feeling of seriousness and importance.

Research has shown typeface is associated with a certain feeling and mood. When people see a text with a Serif typeface, they feel that this text is important or knowledgeable.

On the other hand, Sans-serif typeface provides a more modern and futuristic feeling to the readers. Other typefaces can also be used to create a specific feeling or mood for the reader.
Web designers use typefaces to create distinct emotions that they want customers to experience. It ensures that visitors are connected and continue to explore and delve deeper into the website.

Unique content

The content of a website is arguably the most important part of web design. It is one of the first things customers see when they open a website. This includes numerous elements on a website such as text, images, or videos. Good content builds trust, educates customers, and keeps visitors onpage, amongst other functions.

Unique content serves as the major way for website customers to learn more about what a website has to offer. For example, an ecommerce website should have several original images of the product, carefully crafted and worded descriptions, and specifications. Especially with Google search algorithms improving through AI, it’s become a necessity to hire content marketing professionals that know what content is required.

One of the most common mistakes that web designers make is that they have too much content or just too little. It is good to have well-populated web pages but the amount of content needs to be balanced.

The best way around this is to hire a content writer that creates unique content specific to the business. Unique content on any website will help page ranking as well as separate your website from the competition.

In fact, a website with too much text could result in visitors immediately leaving. Large amounts of text tend to intimidate people because it is hard to find any information in large blocks of text. Web pages with too many images or other multimedia are also not good for websites unless they are organized correctly.

Takeaways on web design

Applying aspects of psychology to web design is a must for any individual creating websites, or thinking of designing on. Usage of psychological logic during web designing will allow web developers to have a greater impact on their customers. Careful planning and execution of psychological aspects of web design can guide customers to certain information or set up a website’s mood and theme.

Psychology of web design is often applied through various elements of a website like color, page layout, typefaces, and content. Qualified and professional web developers always consider what effect they want the final website to have on visitors.

Author Bio: This article was contributed to EcommercePlatforms.io by VisualWebz.com.

How many websites have you visited in the last year alone? Given your evident interest in the field of web design, I imagine the number is somewhere north of 10,000 — possibly much higher, depending on how rampantly you consume digital content. And in that sea of sites, there will have been a fair number of clunkers.

Yes, even though the web is well out of its adolescence and into adulthood by now, there are still plenty of questionably-designed websites still around. These sites offer up features and layouts that make users cringe, sending them racing away to greener pastures, so it’s of paramount importance that you make sure your site isn’t one of them.

To help you audit your site and polish it to an inviting mirror shine, let’s take a look at some of the obvious web design mistakes that pollute the internet, and the keys to avoiding them:

Not presenting any clear actions

Every website — every page — exists for a reason, and that reason is almost always to drive some kind of action. A product page pushes people to buy, a contact page pushes people to get in touch, and a donation page pushes people to donate. Think about it this way: a page you put on the internet gives some kind of value to the user, and the action it drives returns that value.

The problem with some careless web designers is that they make their pages slick and convincing but forget to ask for anything. It’s like giving someone a spectacular sales pitch for a mystery product but going quiet and walking away when they excitedly ask how they can buy it.

Avoiding this pitfall is very simple: ask for what you want. Want someone to sign up to your newsletter? Pay for your service? Fill in a survey? Don’t try to vaguely allude to it. Instead, provide a clear and unmissable CTA. Problem solved.

Using non-responsive layouts

Mobile traffic has become the dominant form of internet browsing, yet there are still sites out there that are poorly optimized for mobile screens. Technically functioning on a smartphone isn’t enough — it isn’t close to being enough. When someone on a modern phone arrives at a site built for desktop screens, they’re likely to laugh, or cry, or do both.

Avoiding this mistake is also easy: use a standardized website builder, or choose a responsive page template, then check your website on various platforms to confirm that it looks alright no matter how or where you view it. If it doesn’t, make the necessary changes and test again.

Opening links in new windows

This is something I find particularly irritating. When I’ve visited a specific site, it’s because I want to see what’s on that site. I don’t mind being pointed elsewhere (because citation is handy, and the internet is full of useful things), but I despise it when I click on a link only to find it opening in a new window. Why? Because I can’t just use the back button to return. I have to actually close the new window.

To avoid this, default your links to opening in the same tab. Follow this process. You can’t ultimately force it, because the user might have specifically selected to open links in new windows, but it’s fine in that scenario because they chose it.

Keeping contact details hidden

You arrive at a site, and the content hooks you. You like the layout, and the navigation, and the copy, and the imagery. If it’s an ecommerce site, you like the products and the prices. You’re almost sold on whatever’s on offer — not quite enough to click the main CTA, but enough to want to know more. So you decide to investigate directly… but where are the contact details?

You’d take a phone number, but you can’t find one. An email address would suffice, but it’s similarly absent. In fact, you can’t find a damn thing that would get you in touch with the people behind the site. Maybe there’s a generic contact form, but it barely looks functional, plus you’d like to be fairly specific with your query.

If they can’t find contact information, can someone truly be sure that they’re dealing with real people? What if the whole website is a sham? It might seem like paranoia, but it doesn’t take that much effort for fraudsters to whip up fake business sites. You might not like the idea of being contacted over the phone, but it really matters for establishing trust, so find a prominent spot to place various contact options.

Going overboard with fonts

Keeping it simple tends to be the best approach for web design, and it’s clearly the case for fonts, because a website that barrages your eyeballs with fonts is truly an affront to good taste. Far from keeping things fresh, it makes copy harder to read, and results in a deeply confusing aesthetic.

As with everything else we’ve looked at, the answer isn’t remotely challenging: it’s simply picking a maximum of two fonts to use for your website copy. You can use styles as you prefer, placing parts in bold or italics, but stick with one or two fonts (three at a stretch) and you’ll avoid the cringe-inducing power of turbulent typography.

There are plenty more obvious web design mistakes you can make, but if we tried to go through them all, we’d be here for years. These ones are particularly egregious, as I see it, so deal with them first — then give your website a top-to-bottom audit from the perspective of a user. If you see something confusing, strange, or outright infuriating, then you’d better get back to the drawing board.

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