Web Design Guide for Everybody

What Is a Web Design?

Web design refers to the process of planning, designing, and updating websites to make them user-friendly. It encompasses various aspects including layout, colors, typography, and imagery, aiming to enhance the user experience.

Web design focuses on how a website looks and how it functions, ensuring it is accessible, easy to navigate, and visually appealing. As technology evolves, web design also focuses on making websites responsive for devices like mobile, tablet and desktop.

The person responsible for web design of the website is called web designer. It’s important to note that for large projects it’s common that more people are involved (UI and UX designers, copywriters, developers).

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design ensures that website is accessible and usable on all devices such as desktop, tablet and mobile. It adapts the layout and content to fit different screen sizes, providing a seamless and user-friendly experience.

Very common way to achieve responsive web design is to incorporate breakpoints. Breakpoints are specific points in the screen width at which the layout of a website changes to ensure it remains user-friendly on different devices.

These breakpoints are set using media queries, and they allow a site to adapt its design and functionality based on the width of the user’s device or browser window.

It’s worth to note that with the rise of mobile usage, it’s even more important to design websites that are mobile-friendly. Keep in mind, well-designed responsive website will look (and work) perfectly on your laptop and mobile.

Interesting fact: A recent survey revealed that 73% of website visitors abandon a site due to its poor mobile optimization. This data highlights a significant trend: in today’s mobile-first world, creating a responsive website is no longer optional but essential to retain user engagement and reduce bounce rates.

Web Design vs Web Development

Many people get this wrong, as these terms are often used interchangeably but refer to entirely different aspects of creating a website.

Many people mistakenly assume they mean the same thing, yet each plays a distinct role in the process of building a successful website.

Web design focuses on the visual aspect of a website. It involves creating the layout, color schemes, typography, and overall aesthetic to ensure the site is both visually appealing and user-friendly.

Website development involves bringing the web design to life through coding and programming. Web developers focus on the technical implementation of the design and ensure that the site functions as intended.

The most common misconception is that web developers also handle web design—but that’s not entirely true. While there are exceptions, web developers typically focus on using markup languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScriptto build a website’s structure and functionality.

To make this guide on web design complete, it’s important to briefly touch on each one of these.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the backbone of every website. It structures the content and defines elements like headings, paragraphs, images, and links. Without HTML, a website would have no framework.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) defines styles for elements, such as colors, fonts, layouts, and spacing, making the website look attractive and consistent.

JavaScript adds dynamic functionality to websites. It enables features like form validation, dropdown menus, sliders, and more, creating a seamless user experience.

Additionally, many developers work with Content Management Systems (CMS), which come with their own set of advantages and drawbacks.

Personally, I rely on WordPress for the majority of my web design projects. It provides excellent flexibility for building websites and offers a wide range of plugins that are useful for marketing and website maintenance.

Web design principles

Web design principles form the foundation of creating websites that are functional, visually appealing, and user-friendly. In this section, we’ll explore the key principles of web design, breaking down why each one matters and how it contributes to a successful website.

Whether you’re designing from scratch or refining an existing site, understanding and applying these principles can transform your web design into a masterpiece.

Here is a full list that I’m going to cover:

Responsiveness
User-centric design
Visual hierarchy
Navigation
Accessibility
Consistency
Readability and typography
Simplicity
White space
Color and contrast
Grid layout

As you can see, many of these web design principles overlap with each other (ex. accessibility with color and contrast). Even though that happens, I believe it’s important to address each one, as they all have some special nuances.

Let’s dive right into it!

Principle 1: Responsiveness

We already touched on responsive web design earlier in this article, but it’s such a foundational principle that it deserves a deeper dive.

Responsiveness ensures that your website adapts seamlessly to any device or screen size.

This principle affects everything. UX, SEO and also conversion rate. If you won’t design your site for mobile, users will just leave without taking any action.

Let’s have a look at National Weather service website. This website is example of everything that can be wrong when it comes to mobile optimization.

As you can see from this example, they haven’t done any mobile optimization whatsoever and that has a huge impact on the users. Nothing can be read or clicked on mobile and that alone is a big red problem.