In
a perfect world, every WordPress developer would have access to their
own crack team of battle-tested designers and front-end wizards, leaving
them free to get their hands dirty with the code they love.
However,
if you’re working on your own and your platform of choice is WordPress,
most clients will see you as a one-man army. You’ll frequently be
expected to make web design choices you might not be comfortable with tackling.
Like
it or loathe it, design is a crucial aspect of every web development
project. It doesn’t matter how elegant your code is if your layout makes
users wince.
In this article, we’ll take an
in-depth look at eight design best practices you can use as a developer
to up your design game and expand your overall marketable skillset.
1. Keep up with Current Design Trends
This isn’t Vogue,
so we’re not going to devote thousands of words to analyzing the
in-and-outs of every current design trend. You’re probably already
unconsciously familiar with what’s hot purely by virtue of general web
browsing. However, it’s well worth your while taking the extra effort to
deliberately investigate major trends in order to stay current.
Topping
the “Most Used” list these days is parallax scrolling: a simple but
effective motion design technique where foreground images move faster
than those in the background. This creates an eye-catching effect, is
easy to implement and lends depth and visual interest to the design of
pages. You’ll see this effect employed quite often to make headlines
really pop and draw readers in.
Parallax is
just a single trend highlighting the overarching scroll-heavy focus of
much of today’s design. Infinite scrolling is another popular, though
mildly controversial, technique.
Another
current trend that rewards close study is material design: Google’s
attempt to create a cohesive visual language across their products and
services. Material design is focused on providing a seamless design
experiences regardless of platform, with a mobile-first mindset.
Moving
along, we come to card-based design (of which Pinterest is a classic
example), a technique with an emphasis on the elegant visual display of
condensed information.
These trends are so
popular because they create visual engagement by following a simple set
of good design rules. We’ll touch on many of these rules as we go
through the rest of our list. Getting familiar with current trends, like
the ones we’ve highlighted, is a great way of turbo-charging your
learning and almost instantly improving your overall design sensibility.
2. Commit to Responsive Design
Responsive
design simply involves the ability to appropriately adjust to every
user’s screen size, device orientation and platform. In a mobile-first
world, it’s an absolute requirement for modern sites on the front end
but can often feel like a duct-taped nightmare of media queries and
assorted hacks under the covers.
There’s no
getting away from it though: users rightly expect websites and apps to
display and function flawlessly across myriad devices. As a developer,
you know that a seamless experience across platforms requires a lot of
testing and fixing, but that’s no excuse to slack off.
To
underline how important this is, overlooking this crucial design
element means you could be kissing goodbye to a third of website
traffic.
Implementing responsive design
needn’t be a daunting task however, and developers these days have it
much easier than even a couple of years ago in this regard. Make sure
you’re getting this right and not sabotaging your designs for a
considerable part of your audience.
3. Make Content Easily Accessible
Bounce
rates vary wildly across websites, but one of the uncomfortable truths
of online design is that a large number of people will be hitting your
carefully constructed content and heading straight for the virtual door.
People
make astonishingly quick decisions about whether to stay on a site or
not, and your job as a designer is to make it as appealing as possible
for them to linger and look around. Poor layout choices, lack of search
options and plain old irrelevant or low-quality content are all things
that will send visitors packing.
From a
design standpoint, you want users to be able to quickly determine which
part of your website holds the information they seek. Keep the
navigation friendly and label everything clearly to avoid confusion.
4. Remember That White Space Is Your Friend
By the nature of Houston Web Design
work, developers are an organized bunch most of the time. More often
than not, however, they are optimizing for efficiency rather than
aesthetics. This is why they often tend to treat websites like old-timey
newspapers – filled to the brim with information, but a nightmare for
users to actually consume.
You want users to
be naturally visually drawn to the most important information in any
section of your website. Effective use of white space is one of the most
elegant and time-tested ways of doing this.
Not
only does white space serve to highlight important information, it also
improves reading comprehension and makes your overall design look
substantially sleeker. Add it to your arsenal of design tricks and your
sites will instantly start looking more polished.
5. Understand the Importance of Fonts
In
design terms, fonts are a very big deal indeed. There’s a reason
designers don’t just slap everything up in Comic Sans or Courier and
call it a day. Unless you’re running a gallery-based portfolio, the
chances are that the vast majority of the content of your projects will
be in text form.
In the bad old days, you
could only choose from a limited set of fonts while doing web design,
but those days are thankfully gone. Browser support for web fonts means
that you’re now only limited by how much time you want to spend finding
the perfect font fit for your site.
An ideal
font will not take attention away from the content itself, or look out
of place in the overall design. Choosing fonts and font pairings is a
design decision that rewards careful thought.
Begin
with a simple typographic primer, such as Matthew Butterick’s
Typography for Lawyers, and you’ll feel those design muscles starting to
flex straightaway.
Every business needs an online presence because everything gets good recognition only after they come online.
For
that, you need to get your web design at a right point. If a customer
wants to know about the company, then he/she will search for the company
with relevant keyword and absence of your company from the internet may
land the customer on your competitor’s website. Eventually turning your
potential customer into your competitor’s customer rather than becoming
yours just because your detail was not available online.
When
a small business owner decides to make an online presence they
eventually end up making a mistake by just considering to make a website
rather than getting the website designed by some expert company. Just
having a website doesn’t help, it must be designed on a few proper
guidelines that will make that small business recognized and that’s why
hiring a web designing company for web design is the best option. You
can make a checklist from the below tips to get an effective website
designed for your business.
1. The Business Target Must Be Clear
Having
a clear target is important because that’s how the web designer will
get an idea of what kind of designs are you expecting.
2. The Web Design Should Have The Latest Programming Languages
There
are old programming languages that are backbones of the web designing
but there are modern programming languages as well, that makes the
website look much better.
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