We all know that successful website design involves more than meets the eye. If it's possible to break websites down, these would be the five components of successful design.
Component One: Eye Appeal
Success depends on eye appealing to draw a visitor in and keep them around for awhile. While what makes a website appealing to the eye can certainly vary from one kind of website to another, components that have a major effect include color palettes, photos, graphics, logos, fonts, font sizes, and even the spacing between lines of text. You know when you stumble across a great site that just immediately feels right? That's a design working through eye appeal.
Component Two: Written Content
While it is extremely important for a website to be attractive to the visitor's eye, even more important is the actual content itself. About ninety-nine percent of the time, a website's visitor did not visit just to look at the site's design. Instead, they came to the site hoping to find some type of information they've been seeking. What that information is can be completely different from one site's niche to another, but one thing is certain – visitors want quality and substantive content.
Component Three: Effective Navigation
Did you ever visit a really great website with awesome looking graphic design and plenty of content, but you just were not able to get to what you really were looking for? Clear and effective navigation is a critical component of successful web design. Unfortunately, it is often overlooked in favor of some flashy kind of navbar menu. Common sense says that having search helps, but when it comes to effective navigation, visitors still love a traditional top or sidebar navigational menu – it's just what makes the most sense to the most site users.
Component Four: Compliant Coding
Even though most visitors will never even see it, having clean, standards-compliant coding behind the scenes is of the utmost importance. Experts at web design know that a site always performs better with clean and accurate coding. Plus, search engines also rely on certain components of the coding to understand, rank, and list a website as efficiently as possible.
Component Five: Functional Feedback
What is functional feedback? Well, it can be any number of things, including a call to action, getting a visitor to click on an ad, converting visitors to sales, and persuading a visitor to call or write for more information. Basically, functional feedback is when a visitor responds to a website's purpose in a desirable way. Good website design takes this into account and "funnels" visitors towards that desired action – helping both the visitor and the site owner.
Do take notice that each of these five components of website design complements each other. By getting all of them to work together, the big picture of successful web design really begins to shape up.
