User-experience plays a vital role in the success of a website. As web designers, you must ensure that the visitors don’t feel confused while navigating through the webpages. They should get what they are looking for instantly. But in addition to user-experience, there are several other aspects that you need to keep in mind while designing a website.

Beginners often experience lots of roadblocks before building their first website. The following professional-level web design tips should help them overcome those hurdles and build websites that are not only attractive but user-friendly as well.

1. Don’t use more than three fonts

A different font on every page makes your website look unprofessional. In fact, pros believe that it makes your website look messy. Just stick to three fonts and no more: one for the header, one for your web content, and one for the call-to-action message or your logo. Some clients may even ask you to stick to just one font. That’s fine too. Just make sure that the font you choose is legible and you select a good size. 14-16 px is the ideal size for web content.

2. Select the best colors

A cohesive color tone makes your website look superb. Just like fonts, you shouldn’t use too many colors on your website. That only proves that you are new to this industry, and your clients may ask you to edit and tone down the colors. It’s best to stick to a specific color theme, depending on the brand guidelines. Also, don’t forget to use a similar color for call-to-action buttons. If the logo already has a primary color, you can select a couple of complementary colors to give a contrasting effect.

3. Keep a bit of white space

Consider the website as your home’s interiors. Do you paint every corner of the walls and ceilings with your favorite color? You don’t. This allows your furnishings and home’s features to stand out. The same concept applies for your website. Don’t fill every pixel of the website with images, GIFs, or colors. Leave some white space to attract the visitor’s attention to areas where you want them to focus. Most importantly, it makes the website look neat, clean, and uncluttered.

4. Follow a grid system

A clean website design means you are successful in keeping the alignment of buttons, sections, and text blocks straight. This is the time when you should use the grid system. A grid system, because of its block format, makes a big difference when it comes to making your website look professional.

5. Keep responsive web design in mind

Remember, most users will visit the website both from the computer and from the mobile phone. Therefore, you should focus on responsive web design instead of limiting the website’s design to desktop-version only. One of the reasons why following a grid system is so crucial is it enables you to design a responsive website. You can place the blocks, buttons, and sections according to how you want the website to look on a mobile phone.

6. Implement content hierarchies

A webpage full of text may seem boring to many. Visitors may want to click on the back button after reading a few lines. For pages in the website with blog posts, make sure you use subhead hierarchies that come with short body copy. This gives the viewers an idea of what to expect from the webpage. It makes reading easier for those who usually want to avoid long posts.

The process of web designing is fun. It has enough room to show your innovation and creativity. But keep these pro tips in mind to build websites that become instantly popular among viewers.

If you need or want a website in order to accomplish something, then you need to know what the fundamentals and basics are. Should you be looking to create your own website, you not only have to know them, but you have to master them. Even if you’re paying someone else to design your website for you, it’s still best to know these principles so that you can convey your ideal website and your goals to your designer, so they can create what you’re looking for.

Establish the Goal of the Site

The first and foremost element of website design is considering what the goal of the website is. Are you looking to make money? If so, how so? Are you directly selling a product or service through the site? Or do you just want to generate a list of prospective contacts or list and newsletter subscriptions? Even if you aren’t looking to generate some kind of revenue or make money somehow, are you promoting a cause or belief you believe in, or are you looking to entertain your visitors? Know exactly why the site exists so that every other element of it can be done in the proper context.

Another early key element to your website design is the name of the website. It does not have to match the URL or domain name exactly, but it needs to be very close. The reason for that is that some users trying to find or return to your site might type the website name into the URL bar of their browser. If the name is close enough, then the search engine associated with their browser will bring them straight to your website. The name should identify what your website is about quickly and efficiently and be easy to remember.

Website Theme and Content

Once you know the goal and name of your website, it’s time to think of themes and content. This would be the breakdown of topics that your website covers, as well as specific functions. Consider the articles, blog posts, forums, podcasts, video files and other content that you want primarily featured on your website. You need to figure out what the core group of primary content pieces are going to be on your site, in particular the first page, but you also need to determine how often you’re going to add fresh content as well.

Selecting specific content pieces is closely related to another fundamental of key website design, and that is the keyword or handful of keywords and search phrases that you are going to optimize for. Now, it’s perfectly possible that you just want to build a website for the novelty of it, for fun, or just so it’s there as a resource, and you don’t plan on doing search engine optimization. If you do not have high ambitions for your site, then it’s likely fine to skip SEO. However, if you are building a website, you do want people to find it and use it, and SEO does bring organic traffic. So, it makes sense to pick three to five keywords and make sure your content and website page code cater to them. There are other technical matters you can look into for website optimization, ranging from the use of tags to internal link structures, all of which help search engine crawlers find and index your content.

Responsive Website Design

A huge fundamental in website design right now is the growing awareness of the power of responsive design. The Internet is no longer used primarily on desktops and even in that realm, there are monitors ranging from 15 to 19 inches to users using big screen televisions as computer monitors. On the other end, you have smartphone users and tablet owners joining laptop carriers in the mobile crowd. If you wish to refer all responsive website design to another website designer and colleague, we would be excited to work with you. We’re well known in the Las Vegas area, but work with national clients, as well. You can also see our positive reviews here:

Responsive website design is not mandatory, but it’s about the only way to make sure that your text, images, and content all automatically scale to the size screen they’re on so that everyone can view your website, regardless of their device.

One last key to good website design is remembering a little thing like social media widgets so users can share your content. When they do that, they tell the world your site is worth a few minutes of attention, they boost your exposure, and you get some backlinks to help out organic search results.