Nowadays, we take a look at a site like goldenpromo.codes and think, wow, this is a great site! Well, maybe it’s not that obvious to some people, but when you spot a bad one, you definitely think that the site is bad. Commonly, sites fail at some point, and they are bad at one thing. The first common mistakes that come to mind are terrible optimization for mobile devices.
The second thing that comes to mind is terrible navigation and filtering. How hard can it be for stores that sell monitors to add a filter for refresh rates, when that is one of the most commonly searched for features when purchasing monitors?
Web design deals with all of these things and here is what you should know about it and what it means.
What is Web Design?
Web design refers to the design of a website, the way it looks and the way that it operates. Web design deals with everything from the visuals, to the typography, to the way the code is running on the site. Loading times, SEO and anything that has to do with the user experience.
It typically means working on the front-end of the site, which is the client side of things. As opposed, the back-end would be working on the server side of things, which is often reserved for web developers. The two are connected, but a designer would not need to know back-end programming to be a designer.
Areas of Web Design
Web design deals with a couple of areas of web development that are on the front-end side of things. Here are those areas, in no particular order.
User Experience
User experience refers to what the user sees and how they understand and interact with the content on the site. That can be anything from navigation, visuals, to the very content that is placed on the site. Interactive design is often more attractive than a simpler layout with only written text and a couple of images.
These types of interactive images are a part of a successful design and they are programmed using Javascript, 99% of the time. The rest of the site’s content is often generated by HTML and CSS. These three languages are the ones that a designer should always know.
Code Quality
A site should always have the highest quality code in order to work fast. Fast sites attract more customers or rather, they retain them. A site that loads slowly is not a site that a customer will want to visit again, especially if the rest of the site was also bad.
Quality of code should always be tested and the site should be accessed from multiple devices, to see how it handles various situations.
Visual Design and Typography
Web design is not just code, but also art in a way. A designer needs to select the right visuals, colors and typography, for the site to look good. Limiting typography to a single font could work, while multiple typefaces could be better in some situations.
The visuals also determine what the site will look like, the choice of colors and even more importantly, how everything is organized. Page layouts can make or break a site. A badly designed page will have visitors leaving confused and without knowing what the site offered.
Web design is very important in the process of building a successful website.