The Fundamentals of Modern Web Design: What Makes a Great Website?

It’s not enough to simply have a website. To be successful, you must have a website that people want to visit. 

And that all starts with impactful web design. According to one study, people make snap judgments about the quality of a website within one-twentieth of a second of landing on a page. Within that time frame, they’ll have had no time to analyze the website’s content. All they have to base their judgment on is its design. 

Working with a web design company to get a site infused with modern design standards has many advantages. But it can also help boost Google ranking, which can have a dramatic impact on the number of visitors a website receives. 

So, what makes a great website for your visitors and for Google? Let’s take a look. 

Clarity of Purpose

Good websites respect their visitors’ time. They ensure that the site’s design offers clarity of purpose to new visitors, outlining what and who the website is for as quickly as possible. A good web design company can provide a website that aligns with your overall branding and also one that instantly conveys to your web visitors what your brand is all about. 

Intuitive Design 

The world is complicated enough; when a visitor lands on a website, they want an experience that’s as smooth and straightforward as possible. A great website has an intuitive design, by which we mean it makes it easy for visitors to move around. At no point in their journey should the visitor feel unsure of how to reach a particular page. That’s achieved by incorporating visual clues, clear links, and well-thought-out navigation into the design. 

Visual Appeal

All successful websites incorporate colors, images, and other visual elements into their designs. This helps to increase the website’s visual appeal, which in turn boosts engagement, which in turn leads to the user spending more time on the site, which is exactly why businesses invest in web design in the first place.

The days of ‘walls of text’ are long gone. And in fact, the days of simply inserting images to liven things up are gone, too. Good web design doesn’t just involve adding images, but rather adding them to the right part of the page and with purpose.

Fast Loading Times

A website may be fantastic, but if it takes too long to load, then it’s unlikely that anyone will stick around to figure that out for themselves. Great web design recognizes that web users are an impatient bunch, and will work to ensure that the site loads quickly and correctly. So ultimately, it’s not just about how great the website looks, but how quickly it can show its greatness that counts. 

Cross-Device Functionality 

Finally, great websites work just as well regardless of what type of device the user is using. In an age when people are increasingly accessing websites via their smartphones, having a website that works flawlessly on mobile devices is paramount. That doesn’t mean that other users are left behind, however. The website should be high functioning on all devices: smartphones, tablets, and desktops.