6 Must Have Website Design Elements
In our modern world of technology, it takes a user only a few seconds to decide whether they will stay on your website or leave it. And although websites are fundamentally created from the same set of tools, the elements can vary dramatically.
Website design is crucial in attracting—and keeping—users on your website. A cohesive and dynamic design highlights your brand’s look and feel, creating a memorable experience for users.
Tackle these unique website design elements to uplift your web presence and keep your users engaged.
1. Design a Favicon for Brand Recognition
Favicons are small pixel-based icons, typically designed to match your brand’s look and feel. These icons exist next to anything that identifies your website—such as tabs, bookmarks, toolbar apps, and history results.
Using an easily-recognizable favicon within your brand style is one of the easiest ways to capitalize on brand recognition. It helps the user visually recognize your brand—even when it’s nestled between a long list of open tabs or a lengthy bookmarks list.
Most favicons are sized at either 16×16 or 32×32. When considering the design, keep it simple and straightforward. Because of the small size, it’s best to take a minimalist approach to branding.
2. Prepare for Mobile Traffic
Mobile web traffic has consistently accounted for approximately half of all global web traffic since early 2017. This underscores the need to optimize and design your website for a mobile-first experience. If your website isn’t responsive or seamless on mobile, it can result in bounces, missed leads, and lost conversions.
As you evaluate your website’s overall design, consider your website’s overall responsiveness. If someone visits your website from a phone or tablet, what is their experience like? Does the website retain its original functionality and user experience? Does the design remain cohesive or do certain elements no longer work?
3. Consider Your 404 Error Page
404 pages occur when a specific link is no longer available or if the user has mistyped the URL. Although having a user land on a 404 page is never a goal, it can happen from time to time—especially if you have a content-heavy website with a large number of pages and new content posted often.
One underutilized opportunity to capitalize on a missing page is to create a branded 404 page. Customize this page and use it as a new opportunity to incorporate your branding, create fun and human-centric copy, and add a touch of creativity.
4. Optimize Images for Page-Load Speed
Image file sizes have a large impact on the speed at which your website loads—and if a user clicks through your website and finds themselves waiting, they’re much more likely to leave your page and cost you the conversion.
In fact, the first five seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on overall conversion rates. One of the easiest ways to improve your page load speed is to compress and optimize images and text. In doing so, 25 percent of your pages could save more than 250KB—and 10% can save more than 1MB.
5. Define Type Hierarchy
Your website’s type hierarchy plays one of the most important roles when it comes to organizing content and conveying your message to your audience. Having a consistent typographic hierarchy helps to guide the reader’s eye through the text. If you have inconsistent sizes all over the place or your sizes aren’t easily distinguishable, it will make it harder for the user to process your information—and therefore could lead to bounce rates or missed conversions.
6. Design for Accessibility
For many creatives and developers, accessibility is often overlooked—but it’s absolutely a requirement. According to the CDC, 26 percent—or 61 million—of U.S. adults have some type of disability. For adults over the age of 65, this number increases to 40 percent.
Designing for accessibility includes a multi-pronged approach, including using meaningful text label, image descriptions, and other HTML techniques to ensure your website presence remains accessible.
