the principles of good design

Today we take a look at the 5 most important principles of good and effective website design. Website design is more than throwing a few images and text together in an online format, its about user experience, functionality, getting found and having relevant content.

Purpose 
Establishing the purpose of your site is so important as it paints the blueprint of design and user interface. Are you clients looking for information? a product? a service? or a combination of all of the above? Each page needs a purpose that resonates with the user.

Design
Colours, Typeface, layout, images and navigation are all important elements of design, not only do they need to reflect your brand but also remain relevant to the client. Clean lines definitive sections/pages and really good content are a good starting point. 

Load Time
Everybody hates a website that takes ages to load.  Tips to make page load times more effective include optimising image sizes (size and scale), combining code into a central CSS or JavaScript file (this reduces HTTP requests) and minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript (compressed to speed up their load time).

Mobile Friendly
It is now commonplace to access websites from multiple devices with multiple screen sizes, so it is important to consider if your website is mobile friendly. If your website is not mobile friendly, you can either rebuild it in a responsive layout (this means your website will adjust to different screen widths) or you can build a dedicated mobile site (a separate website optimised specifically for mobile users).

Strategy
Having a good marketing strategy is paramount to your websites success, now that the design is down the content is good and relevant its time to get found. Organic SEO is a long term campaign taking time to build page weight and links inward, you can also use PPC, E marketing and social media marketing. 
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