5 Fundamentals of a Successful Modern Web Design

In today's digital world, having an optimized website is simply not enough for acclaiming heavy user traffic and top rankings on search engine pages. As a web designer, you must consider various factors when designing a website. Such factors include modern web design & content, conversion rate, and social media connectivity.

Today, the SEO landscape is changing rapidly along with the way customers view, interact, and consume the content on the internet. It is pivotal for web designers to focus on aspects like aesthetics, modern design, and navigational styles while building a website.

Breaking the Traditional Design Silos

It is a thing of the past when web developers build a site, SEO experts optimize the site, and conversion expert looks at the site, and finally owners to the website review it.

In today's time, while building a website from scratch, it becomes important to adopt a marketing led approach that includes the technical, social, usability, search, and web design teams.

Now, objectives are set by the businesses at the start so that your site reflects not only your brand but also meets its long-term business objectives along with the conversion goals.

First Things First: Focus on the Business and User Objectives

As a web designer, understanding about your client's business goals, potential customers, and competitive environment at large is vital to kick off the design and development process of a website and ensuring that the build site matches its target audience needs and expectations.

For example, a beautifully designed website can fail miserably if it just does not do what it was meant to? The information required in the site is simply not there, it's slow, it's hard to navigate, and it has poor ranking in search results.

Vice versa, if we talk about well-optimized sites, then often they look outdated, less engaging, and lack the relevant content, that Google is mostly looking in websites these days. The moment you try to go 'overboard' with optimization, your site will get flagged as spam by Google and will be thrown away from top search results.

So, it is very important for you as a web designer that you start building a site by first defining goals and conversion points for each page, part, and the section of the website. Call to actions needs to be correctly placed and defined for each section of the content that is present for answering your user's needs and queries. Afterwards, you must handle your design to the SEO and testing team. Now, let's get a detailed idea about:

Top 5 Fundamentals of Modern Web Design

1. Design

For modern web design, the golden rule that you need to follow is that your website needs to be balanced with advanced usability, and a simple, clear, & engaging design. How many times in the past we have seen sites that have not been able to match with the modern design trends as their owners spend too heavy on promotion, marketing, and over-optimizing it, instead of adopting a smart design approach.

A design that looks simple yet modern in nature, informative & engaging, and suitable for SEO optimization is vital to attain success in modern web design.

If we discuss the challenges, a lot of designers struggle with juggling visual representations, HTML and CSS elements. The difference in thinking of a traditional web designer, and a marketer or SEO person also affects how a website actually looks. The former looks for beauty while the latter prefer readability, findability, and crawlability.

Points to Remember

• Always design your site, keeping the target audience needs and expectations in mind.
• Ensure your site is easy to navigate for users.
• Be bold and creative in your design, but don't overdo it. Go for a modern flat look and feel.
• Make sure your design and content complement each other very well.
• Try to use web fonts to add modern style with easy typography and crawlability.

2. Usability

We all know how important inbound traffic is for marketer goals and holds a vital place in the overall SEO strategy. But, the thing that matters most is how well the design and over SEO strategy of your site blends with the usability aspect, i.e., what happens when user once hits your URL.

Years ago, it was a trend to build web projects by keeping the SEO, content, usability, and design as subparts. Usability part was solely focused on the UI, accessibility, technical, and QA testing. Well, if we talk about today, then modern marketing and web design do not support the separation of SEO and usability skill set to that extent.

One must also know the fundamental difference between the information architecture and technical architecture of a website.

Information architecture refers to the process of labelling the website content in such a way that it supports website usability (more in the SEO and content section). Technical architecture focuses on SEO-based labelling, like indexation, canonicalization, crawlability, etc.

Points to Remember

• Make sure you put clear and concise headlines that capture the reader's eyeball instantly..
• Verify the site loading and response time is super fast. Remember a delay worth 2 seconds can lose you a potential customer or sale..
• Give attention to readability-typography, color, text, etc. Ensure the color and fonts chosen by you are easy to read, and proper subheading is selected by you in your information architecture to maintain the logical flow of the content..
• Keep navigation style simple and fluid. Do focus on margins and landing pages.

3. SEO

This is the most crucial area of modern web design where the marketing and technical departments should work together. It is important to build the core on-site SEO principles into the technical architecture of the website. The SEO friendliness and artistic touch must take together in your website design.

Here are some valuable tips to improve SEO friendliness in your design:

Ensure to use SEO friendly URL and URL structure so that search engines find it easy to know what your page is about.

Generate HTML and XML Sitemaps to ensure correct indexing for your site.

Make relevant post titles.

Try to avoid the splash and flash menus-they do look nice, but deter search engines in reading the content embedded inside.

Make sure to use relevant anchor text links. Terms like "click here" or "learn more" looks like a clear call to action, but that doesn't mean search engines do not know that they are important.

Avoid using too many H1 tags and ensure to optimize your site for mobile and tablet search.

4. Content

The old saying of 'Content is King' still holds relevant in modern design and build process. You must iterate that content is core to everything we do in marketing and technical part of a website. Every good design in the past have been greatly complemented with quality content and is a core pillar of the modern design process.

Points to Remember:

Make sure your content says what it needs to say in the easiest, yet attractive way.

Ensure the website content is clear, concise, and relevant.

Never forgot to utilize white spaces and break down different aspects of your content.

Organize your content properly.

5. Integration

Organizational integration the key to success when building a website that works for your business. It is the last part of modern web design that holds vital importance when building a site for your business. Integrating your website design across multiple devices is important in today's times as people consume content across desktop, mobile and tablet devices. Responsive web design is also something where you have one fully-functional and optimized website for every screen, and many have quoted this as the future of web design.

Adding buttons to your site for social media pages also holds importance in improving your website performance and popularity. You must integrate and link campaigns from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter, and so that people engage more on your site also. Also, do not forget to add "Share" options on your website that boosts organic traffic to your site.

Summing Up…

Besides adhering to all the modern design pillars, you must always remember that the site's artistic design is always there for your target audience, not the search engines. So, to sum up, a modern design should always be balanced with the compelling content and SEO elements in the technical and information architecture.