Slanted's Five Principles of Web Design
We’ve built a few websites in our day and through trial and error, we feel we have nailed down our recipe for a successful business website. These are our 5 must-follow principles to create the best and most efficient website.
Principle 1: Keep It Simple Stupid
You know the old adage that our elementary teachers use to tell us: KISS (keep it simple stupid)? Well, it turns out that after all these years they were right. Make sure the content on your website is CLEAR and CONCISE. What you do, who you do it for, and why you do it should be easy to find on your homepage. You’ll also want to save the industry jargon and confusing data for later. Don’t make your potential customers swim through muddy waters full of overcomplicated explanations.
If copywriting isn’t your thing, you can always include that add-on to any of the custom-built websites we do at Slanted.
Principle 2: Hierarchy Matters
We have all been trained from our first experiences reading and writing that hierarchy of informations is crucial for us to understand what we are looking at. Size, color, capitalization, alignment, and space are all ways that web designers structure information. All of the best websites use a consistent and simple hierarchy to lead consumers through the information laid out on a website.
Example:
BEST BOZEMAN WEB DESIGNERS
Gallatin Valley’s best designers come together to showcase their skills and work together.
Every year in Bozeman, Montana State University calls on all of the web designers in the county to come down to campus and teach mini-lectures to future designers on the newest and best features coming to the world of web design.
Principle 3: A picture is worth a thousand words
There is truly nothing that brings a new website together quite like stunning imagery. We could build you the most technically advanced and highest functioning website the world has ever seen but if we don’t have beautiful imagery and video to display, your clients will never care. Though it can add to the overall cost of your website, hiring a photographer to take professional images is one of our biggest recommendations to clients looking to take their website design to the next level.
Our favorite photographers to hire in the Bozeman area are:
Principle 4: Mobile friendly or it doesn’t matter
As much as we want to pretend that we aren’t fully dependent on those little screens in our pockets, statics from across the globe say we are. Almost 60% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your new website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on a huge demographic of potential customers. As web designers, we make sure that each and every one of our websites is designed and developed for optimal use on desktop and mobile devices.
Principle 5: Gotta have goals
Website design and development should ALWAYS start with understanding a business's specific goals. The best website designers make sure that websites not only look good but they have real benchmarks they are trying to meet. Maybe your website is to better explain what your business specializes in, maybe it is to acquire more organic leads, and maybe it is just a landing page that helps your clients easily find your contact information. No matter what the goal is, your site should be designed with that in mind.
Before we start on any website project, we walk each of our clients through a detailed discovery where we learn all about their business, their design preferences, and of course their goals. This process makes sure we deliver a website that our clients not only love visually but helps aid them in the progression of their business.
