Whether you are a web designer or someone who is working on a web creation project, you need to be creative to create quality work. But, creativity alone sometimes isn’t enough.
Dealing with web design, your main focus is users. That being said, your work should correspond to what users want.
Each web project has a different concept and requires a specific approach. Sometimes, the concept is so detailed that you may run into a shortage of ideas on what to create.
If that happens, you might need a source of inspiration to make a website that is not only visually appealing but also fully functional and user-friendly.
In this article, I would like to give you six tips for website design ideas along with several examples of beautifully designed sites.
6 Tips for Website Design Inspiration
There isn’t a solution that fits all dealing with website design problems. However, there are certain main points that would inspire you to come up with a good idea to work on.
1. Come Up With the Structure
Most visitors come to a website with a mission — either to find a piece of information or to buy products or services. Also, they might have limited time to do so.
If your visitors lost their way because of poor website navigation, they might move to another website. In short, your website should have good structure.
To do this, you might define the content categories.
There are content categorizations that you can use depending on the concept of the website:
- By Product Categories — To build an ecommerce website, defining product categories is the key. A good example is Etsy.
- By Users — If you serve more than one user than you need to make a clear distinction about it as Freelancer did.
- By Task — To let people do one thing at a time will make easier the customers to follow steps like in Cozy.
- By Location — If you are dealing with a business that has multiple locations around the world like Madame Tussauds, then define the design based on the locations.
A good content structure is not only beneficial for your visitors but also an important aspect of your SEO efforts.
2. Web Standards Matter
Although you can make each design unique, there are certain standards you might want to follow.
You can’t make a website without a logo, a header, or social media icons just because it is conflicting with your design.
Also, it is important to make your website to look the same wherever your visitors access it.
To do so, you need to follow certain standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Being Web Standards compliant, you can gain many benefits such as:
- Compatibility — there are guidelines to make your website accessible from any device, be it desktop or mobile.
- Easy Maintenance — the standards encourage clean coding to make the website easily maintained once problems occur.
- Better SEO — it would help you to rank high on search engine result page if you fulfill the standard of a good website.
3. Create Mood Boards
A mood board — a visual brief — is a helpful tool to help you sort of specific website elements. It will help to make your site align with the project goals or your client’s expectations.
The elements you can include in your mood boards are images, fonts, color schemes, navigation styles, and grids.
One of the great platforms for this is Pinterest. It is easy to use and there are thousands upon thousands of website design ideas for you to explore.
4. Be Mobile
As there are more than 4 billion active mobile users, if you make a design which is not mobile-friendly, you will miss a huge chunk of potential customers.
That’s why you need to make sure your site can adapt to various screen sizes.
5. A/B Testing
A/B testing — split testing — is a way to try two different designs to see which one is better in terms of usefulness and aesthetics.
To conduct A/B testing you need to define your goals and pick a certain element to test. For example, if you want to know if visitors would prefer the category menus located on top of the page or on the right-hand side.
By conducting A/B testing, you might reduce risks of direct changes, improve users’ engagement, and increase sales probabilities.
6. Content is Key
As you might know that people read content differently on websites, thus it will influence your design quite a lot.
That being said, choosing the content display is crucial. Not only that, you need to manage your content well to make your visitors engage more.
A few things that you need to consider when creating content are good headings, proper fonts, original images, and another formatting setup.
5 Beautiful Websites for Design Inspiration
After presenting a few tips for website design inspiration, now I would like to show you five websites with amazing design to inspire you.
1. Angle2 Agency
The message is obvious – if you want to help people create great websites, your website too has to be extraordinary. This is exactly what Angle Agency showcases.
At first, you will be surprised by the vertical loading animation of the homepage. But, you must wait until the page is fully loaded to find that the overall appearance of this website is jaw-dropping.
The combination of bold text arrangement and great animation is what makes this website fantastic.
However, to keep the functionality and to avoid clutter, this website implements two nice little touches. First, they keep the standard heading menus and they limit the use of colors to three picks: black, white and cyan.
2. Akris
Another amazing website that might inspire you is Akris. This fashion store website uses thin menu icons on the headings to support its minimal design.
But, once you choose the search or the location menu, you will see how great is this little icon serves you. Not only you can jump right into the specific collection you want, but find the nearest store to location.
It’s great structure and design work well together, making for the best user-experience.
3. Zoco Design
Zoco Design is a great example of how the design fits in the content and helps to communicate the message.
The background image alone speaks volumes – you know the agency will solve even the biggest problems you face.
Then, if you scroll down further, you will see examples of their work to support the upfront idea.
An amazing design can tell a story!
4. Kotryna Bass
It’s not surprising at all that Kotryna Bass’ website is gorgeous. After all, not only is she a lifestyle blogger, but she designs themes as well.
This website shows the clear message upfront: what Kotryna does and what she wants to share as a lifestyle and digital creative blogger.
The whole website is very easy to navigate, practical and fast. In addition to that, it’s filled with beautiful images, well-paired colors and sleek design elements.
5. Feed Music
Not only the background animation is wonderful, but the Musixmatch-lyrics text effects are also exceptionally brilliant. Once you scroll down to read the text, you will see the menu on the heading with a progress bar. Charming.
Wrap Up
I know that finding the right idea for a website creation project might be hard sometimes. But, as a good web designer with great skill, you should not wait for the inspiration to come.
Instead, you can start with the six tips I have presented to you. Or, if you need some inspiration at work, I have picked the best 5 websites with attractive design for you.
Now, what are you waiting for? Go create a stunning website that stands out from others!
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