Key Elements of Modern Website Design

Modern website design in itself is a relative phrase. Many people might think a website designed in 2010 is modern, whereas others in the field have seen so many new changes in the past year, that anything that is pre-2019 is already outdated to them. However, what we noticed most is that modern website design doesn’t benefit from a ton of bells and whistles. The more simple and clean a website is, the better the user experience is.

Key Elements

Listed below are the seven key elements of modern web design:

1. Strong, but Limited, Color Palette

Although it may sound normal, the color scheme and color usage are a very important factor in modern web design. A good color palette will create coherence between everything when designing. Companies with both primary and secondary color palettes have more options to select from when creating new elements for their websites, ranging from the homepage, landing pages, blogs, or a resource database.

Moreover, the number of colors that you incorporate in your design also plays a vital role. Too many colors can be distracting so modern website design suggests not using more than two or three colors at the most. Simplifying the color scheme of your site makes it easier to focus, and this is why there are only minimal color combinations in modern website designs.

Even when you look at huge sites like Apple and Amazon you will certainly not find many colors used. They certainly have one background color (white or black) and one major accent color (silver, yellow, and blue, respectively).

2. Plenty of White Space

White space is very attractive. It’s a term defining the “empty” space that acts as a buffer between all elements on the page, including copy, sidebar, margins, etc. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be white. White space helps your website from looking overcrowded.

Purposely designing your website’s white space helps to maintain a clean design making it easily digestible and organized. As more websites are adopting a more minimalistic style, keeping space open on your page will allow your reader to navigate their way around the page more easily.

3. Relevant Calls-to-Action

Websites are meant to connect with the people who have similar interests, be it content, products and services and once the connection is made you do your best to maintain it. Converting visitors into leads and customers is a vital aspect of website designing.

Things like email subscription forms, free downloadable ebooks or whitepapers, free product forms, free consultations, or other invites are some great calls-to-action (CTAs). Relevant CTA’s should be included throughout the website- at the end of blog posts, in the sidebars, and in your resources page, to name a few.

Incorporating the CTA’s strategically into your website design helps in gathering the contact information (typically just an email address) of your visitors so that you can continue conversations with them thus helping in creating leads and converting them into customers.

4. Clean Backend Coding

Backend Coding is most important when it comes to the functionality/performance of your site. Although it’s not a visible element to the visitors yet it plays the most vital role in a website’s performance, making it flawless, fast and effective, resulting in the conversion of visitors to leads and customers

Thus dedicating time for clean backend coding makes it worth your time. If you don’t have clean backend coding, it will become harder to locate and fix any issues that may come up.

5. “Users First” Designing

“User first” element of modern website design is self-explanatory: You should design your site user-friendly, not just to boost your rankings in search engine.

Many Companies, out of a sense of desperation to get better rankings, tend to do things that are “good” for Google but bad for the users which ultimately affect the visitors/customers. Moreover, Google is smart: it can tell when your users are getting good value from your website because if a user is getting value from your website they keep coming back and spending more time on it.

Thus a website should be user-friendly and content should be specifically designed for users not for SEO purposes. This will help build a group of loyal, recurring visitors.

6. SEO-Boosting Elements

SEO is also one of the vital elements. While Explaining “User First” I mentioned that a website should be designed for the user first, that doesn’t mean that SEO doesn’t matter.

Modern website design features elements in the backend coding that can improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website. These features are invisible to the naked eye yet help with your sites SEO while delivering the best user experience.

Designing tricks like Meta tags, title tags, heading tags, and other HTML codes go a long way in helping your website get ranked better in Google’s search engine. All you have to do is make sure that you fill out, tweak, and optimize these elements, so they are relevant to your site and help in better search ranking.

7. Speed Optimization

Speed Optimization is an imperative design element. It should not be overlooked. The fast pace our technology generation is living in they expect things to happen with immediate effect be it a website; they want it to load immediately. If the site takes too long to load they may end up leaving it and never returning. As a business you don’t want that to happen i.e. you don’t want leads and prospects to think negatively of your brand just because your website is slow.

To make sure your website is fully optimized for speed, here are a few tips:

• Always optimize the photos, no matter how small they are.
• Enable compression so files will be smaller and open quickly.
• Minimize HTTP requests in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools.
• Choose the proper hosting options, whether it’s shared hosting, VPS hosting, or a dedicated server.

Conclusion    

As you make a new website you must not forget to incorporate these seven elements into your website design. Moreover, you should focus on Prioritizing user-experience which is a vital part of developing your business and make sure that you optimize your website for not only its physical design but its functionality too.

Using these tips, your company can create a kick-ass website design that will help you attract new visitors to your site, generating leads, and last but not the least converts the prospects into loyal customers.