The world is changing so fast, and just like the year 2023, consumer demands and insights have also changed. In order to keep your target market’s attention on your brand and your products, you will have to strive more than before. The market has grown so large that as technology has advanced, people now have thousands of options. Thus, marketing yourself and being noticed will cost you a fortune. If not, own something that catches consumers’ eyes effortlessly.
Website Design Principles
The Website Design Principles are a set of universal rules or design guidelines that designers can use to create effective and efficient web designs. These design principles assist designers in creating visually appealing user experiences and interfaces by aligning and organizing elements and decorating them appropriately.
To save you the hassle, there are competent WordPress development agencies that apply these design principles to your website to make it stand out among the rest.
Why does your WordPress website need to follow these Design Principles?
Coherence: It will assist you in designing a website that is coherent with your brand.
User Experience: It will improve your website’s user experience (UX).
Brand Image: It will influence how people see your website and brand.
Decision-Making: It will help you make better design decisions for your website.
Key Design Principles:
A team of designers in any successful web development agency knows and applies these principles when creating a web design that proves to be a cash cow for the website owner.
- Hierarchy:
For any website, hierarchy is a priority for web developers and designers. They organize and present the web page’s design elements and features, which show each element’s relative importance. Hierarchy impacts user perception, which can be influenced by the visual contrasts, sizes, and placements of the features and elements.
You can achieve a successful hierarchy by adjusting
- The size
- Symmetry
- Color
- Grouping and Similarity
- Contrast
- Element Style
Note: Mixing all these elements will cause confusion and disruption in the design, and you may lose more than expected users and consumers.
- Focal Point
Decide on a single or a maximum of two focus points for the users. Focal points are parts of the website to which you want to draw your users’ attention. Make sure that the focal point of your website is the most important aspect of your WordPress website.
Note: Making multiple elements focal points will end up being a disaster and scatter the user’s attention. Make your focus point at the intersection of two lines to draw attention to where you want it to be.
- Color
Colors and color combinations on a website are essential design elements. Designers at winning agencies apply color theories and psychologies to design and align colors that are attractive and go with the business and brand.
You must:
- Opt for muted colors or pastel color palettes as primary colors for your website interface design.
- Pick two colors (a light and a dark color) for depth, professionalism, and variety on your website design
- Pick two types of dark colors.
- Add neutral colors (nude, white, gray, black)
- DO NOT use full opacity for the white and the black neutral colors. (You don’t want your users to go blind, right?)
- Use a maximum of three accent colors. It will be hard to manage the combination.
- Choose strong colors to contrast with the night/dark mode of the devices.
Usually, WordPress has options to choose primary and secondary colors, but you can use variants on your colors to make them unique and according to your needs. Designers use color calculators to manage your website’s primary and secondary colors and create harmony between them.
- Alignment
A perfect WordPress website or any other website is perfectly aligned, and its elements seem parallel and well-spaced with the lines, margins, and everything else. A great designer is very good at aligning elements and designing them so that the website looks symmetrical and organized. It depends on the design, the designer, and you (of course) to decide whether you want it to be center-aligned or edge-aligned.
Center-aligned: The contents are positioned and lined up with one another in the center of the website.
Edge-aligned: The contents are positioned to match up with the edge of the website.
To save time, developers use WordPress plugins known as “page builders” to align the content with the website perfectly. Programmers use the CSS float property to align elements on the web pages of your WordPress website.
- Typography
Typography is the fastest way and technique to make the website’s written language readable, informative, and attractive to a user.
A Perfect Font:
- Designers at great web development agencies spend a lot of time determining your brand aesthetics and mood and then come up with a font that goes with it.
- Font hacks used by WordPress website designers:
- Use the same family fonts to get along with every content on your website.
- Use Serif as a rule of thumb. (Sans Serif for headings, Serif for content)
- Use handwriting fonts for creativity, NOT FOR CONTENT.
- For content, use simpler and non-decorative fronts to show professionalism.
- Too many font styles – an invited design disaster. Two fonts are enough, and good to go!
- Flow
Meticulous choices of design elements like content typography, images, lines, and negative space create the flow of a website. A website with good flow allows users’ eyes to flow through the content piece by piece without being obstructed.
An insightful design team is sensitive enough to create the website flow and doesn’t let it break the eye movement through text blocks, navigations, sliders, etc.
Z-Flow: Left-to-right eye movements flow on the website content as the users read it in the form of imaginary horizontal lines forming a Z-like pattern.
F-Flow: From left to right, the eye flows over the website content, and readers read the left side of the page, forming an “F” shape.
- Composition
Placement and design of the web pages that organize the elements of the website, creating balanced compositions and applying the “Rule of Thirds.”
Rule of Thirds: An image is imagined to be divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines. The most important aspect of the picture must be placed as close to the intersection as possible.
Unconsciously, the rule of thirds creates more flow in the WordPress website composition than centering the focal point.
- Consistency
Throughout the website’s design, consistency is a must. It includes everything like images, fonts, color palettes, etc. A similar look on your website makes it more appealing to the eyes.
WordPress designers who pay attention to details follow critical steps to make the website more user-friendly and attractive. If you are focusing on making your website flawless, try hiring a competent WordPress development agency that can understand your requirements and cover all aspects of your website beautifully.
- Parallax Effects
Parallax effects are the motion effects used to make your website more user-friendly and interactive. They are notable for retaining user attention if appropriately used. Too much of the parallax effect will make your website disorienting to visit.
A good designer knows where to place motion effects to highlight the important stuff on your website without creating a moving mess everywhere.
It can highlight:
- The written content you want your users to focus on
- Any picture or illustration
- The website itself by adding parallax effects on scrolling.
- Minimalism
For any website, including your robust WordPress website, less is more. A minimalistic design keeps the site organized and free of clutter. When a website contains too many elements, it reduces the influence of the message you try to convey to your users.
Minimalistic websites:
- look more attractive for users to scroll.
- convey your idea and brand message effortlessly.
- give you better design ideas to stand out in the market.
How do top agencies apply these principles to your projects?
These guidelines are followed by determined WordPress agencies to stay at the top and continue producing final products that always ace in the relevant industry.
Stays Familiar With Best Practices
WordPress design agencies stay current and investigate the best UX design practices on the market. They would instead be described as risk-takers in marketing. They learn from the existing trends and keep creating, using their research capabilities and inspirations to know more about their consumers and requirements.
Choose Principles Wisely
Knowing that each project is unique and industries are different, designers and their agencies choose principles accordingly. They prioritize the principles that yield the best results, provide the most efficient functionalities, flow effortlessly, are responsive, and are in the best interest of the business and its goals.
Regular Test And Improve Designs
Who is your target market? Designers test your website keeping this question in mind. Successful in determining the answer to that question and answering it accordingly, they test it with the help of your insights, co-designers, and Quality assurance teams to gather proper input and provide relevant and attractive output.
They achieve greatness and perfection on the website due to this process.
Practice
Practicing the design guidelines repeatedly automates the principle in every design, making it successful and memorable. That is why relying on WordPress web agencies is a good choice. They generate practical solutions and prevent issues in a snap due to their expertise and years of experience with design principles.
Form Unique Style
Forming unique design styles is developed by the agencies, which have been in the game for too long now and know the basics at their fingertips. These principles are great and should be followed, but not blindly. Designers who are experts in their fields effortlessly design products by breaking some rules, knowing the purpose, and doing that consciously.
Once the great agencies master these design principles, they create masterpieces. And even when they break the rules, they do it deliberately and purposefully.
Use Elementor and Relevant Design Plugins
Many WordPress plugins are designed and coded following these design guidelines. These plugins have vast collections of toolkits and features that help you design your unique website, structure it better, and make it more user-friendly.
You can follow numerous other web design principles, but these are the basics. If you follow them, up to 80% of your design problems and hurdles will be resolved. You will be able to create WordPress products that are user-friendly, professional, and packed with functionalities
If you can add more to these rules, we will be happy to know. Hit the comment button and participate now!
And it’s a wrap!
