5 Design Tips to Create a Dream Website

Graphic design plays a crucial role in turning your website visitors into paying customers. However, designing a stunning, high-converting website isn’t always easy. After all, you need to strike the right balance between visually pleasing design and conversion elements to convince visitors to act on your conversions goals with these design tips. Plus, if you don’t have an in-house graphic design team or the budget to work with a top web design agency in NJ, building your website can be laborious and resource-draining.

The good news is that we’ve got you covered with these five web and graphic design tips for creating the website of your dreams and helping you achieve your business goals.

1. Plan your design

Any design should start with a solid plan, and planning your website’s design is no different. Create a plan to help determine your design’s objective, including what you want your visitors to see and take away. Start with rough sketches to map out your web pages. You can outline where to place your content and graphic design elements.

Discuss with your team and get ideas about the critical elements and content you need to include and the structure you want. You can use powerful project management software to help your team organize and collaborate on your web design planning and deployment.

For instance, ClickUp lets you create and assign tasks for your project, set deadlines, track the progress, schedule activities, prioritize jobs, and more to streamline your web and graphic design planning process.

You can work more efficiently and eliminate the potential chaos of not organizing and planning your web design. The tool can also help your team focus on their assigned tasks, reducing the risks of missing critical tasks and deadlines. 

2. Leverage color and scale to highlight important elements

Colors are excellent web and graphic design elements to emphasize critical sections, texts, Calls-to-Action (CTAs), etc., on your website. When used correctly, colors can help you establish visual hierarchy, scale website elements, and imply importance.

You can use contrasting colors to help you draw attention to the most visually dominant element on your landing page. For instance, you can use light-colored texts for your CTAs against a dark-colored background to direct your visitor’s eye to your CTA button. Implementing visual hierarchy through colors helps encourage your audience to follow a specific path to your conversion elements.

3. Use proper alignment

Properly aligning your web design elements can help you create structure across your web pages. It can naturally lead your visitors’ eyes to where you want them to go. Plus, the lack of appropriate alignment can make your website look sloppy, unprofessional, and even confusing to visitors.

It can also cause visitors to question your site’s credibility, which doesn’t help you build trust with them, and you end up losing tons of conversion and sales opportunities. Start by aligning the following web page elements:

• Headings. Your headings are often the first elements your viewers see, making it crucial to ensure your headings are properly aligned and visually pleasing.

Configure your letter kerning or spacing to fill dead space, condense headings to keep them from taking too much space, and overall align the text. Avoid reducing the letter-spacing too much that your texts become hard to read or increase it so much that single words appear detached. 

• Body of the text or content. Keep each line within 30 to 40 characters (including spaces) to make your content easy to read. It also ensures that all paragraphs are in line with each other.
• Images and photos. Align your images with a frame or use grids to make them flush with headings, bodies of text, and content.

Popular Content Management Software (CMS) often includes templates and preset alignment options you can easily customize. For instance, Webflow lets you align and justify your HTML elements seamlessly within the center of its parent element via the flexbox feature.

You can change your web pages’ content, text, and image alignment quickly without coding anything, saving you a huge amount of time and effort.

4. Ensure style consistency

Implementing a consistent style in your web design can give your website a sense of cohesiveness. It also helps your audiences remember and recognize your brand better since your style is a huge part of your branding. Choose fonts, lighting, colors, and proportion that make up the style you want and ensure consistency across how you use these and other elements in your design.

For instance, avoid pairing a headline of 120 px with a subheading of 40 px. Also, apply consistency in your images, such as using cool-toned imagery and backgrounds throughout your web pages and other digital marketing channels for your website.

The best way to ensure a consistent design is to create a style guide. It gives your team and designers a standard visual language to follow to achieve a cohesive website design. By implementing these design tips and learning how to create a website from scratch, you can build a visually appealing and cohesive online presence.

5. Utilize white space

A well-designed website doesn’t mean populating every area of your web pages with imagery, texts, fillers, and other elements. Plus, filling every nook and cranny of your website with design elements and content can make your site look overcrowded, overwhelming, and even confusing.

Leverage white space in your design and focus on a single element, such as a text box or video. Use a plain background to keep anything to distract from what you want to highlight. It’s a great approach to keep your web design clean-looking and clutter-free. It also helps you emphasize certain elements, such as your CTA buttons, to draw your visitor’s attention.

Wealthsimple’s home page is a classic example of using whitespace to highlight the CTA.

If you’re unsure about creating balance among your web elements or using white space correctly, start by utilizing lines. For instance, when aligning your text box, graphic element, and heading, consider adding a vertical line to the right or left. Doing so anchors your text and serves as a mock-margin line to make a vertical structure.

You can also combine multiple lines to make rectangle, triangle, or square shapes that border your texts. Strong borders can create visual contrasts between text, and your background can act as a minimalist element to establish order within your design.

Bring your ideal website to life

While there are numerous benefits to working with professional web and graphic design agencies, it’s not always a practical option for your startup (or if you have a limited budget). If you and your team are willing to put in the work yourself or want to get a good handle on your desired website design before working with designers and developers, learn from the tips in this guide.

Image credit: Depositphotos