A good website design merges usability with aesthetic style. We’ll uncover the secrets behind what makes a good website design, as well as common mistakes to avoid when building website layouts. Examples included!
In this article, we’ll look at:
- What Makes a Good Website Design?
- 5 Inspiring Website Design Ideas
- Key Elements and Principles of Website Design
- Web Design Common Mistakes
- More Resources for Creating Websites
License this image via Olga S L.
What Makes a Good Website Design?
A good website design merges usability with aesthetic style, resulting in a creative website design that is also easy to navigate through.
The ultimate goal of any successful website design is to allow a user to meet their goal, whether it’s a successful product purchase, location of information, or completing an action.
- How to Refresh Your Website with Imagery and Color
- Best Practices for Using Stock Photography in Web Design
With this in mind, any creative website ideas you have must be mapped out in the form of a user journey first and foremost. You can use creative design ideas to bring your page designing ideas to life, but the path a user takes from landing on your website to completing their journey must always be at the forefront of your mind.
A good website design merges usability with aesthetic style, resulting in a creative website design that is also easy to navigate through.
However, this isn’t to say that designing a website is without creativity—the best website designs use eye-catching aesthetics to make the user journey a joyful and engaging one.
Interesting web design ideas look to animation, color, type, graphics, photography, and interactive elements—like buttons and page transitions—to immerse the user in a web design, and encourage your visitors to stay around for longer.
What Are the 4 Basic Web Design Rules?
In summary, we can condense the secrets behind successful web design into four simple and actionable rules.
The best website design ideas include a focus on:
- Creating effective and seamless user journeys that lead clearly towards an actionable goal, and prioritizing accessibility requirements throughout the journey (user journeys can be enhanced through use of UX design principles).
- Enhancing the user journey through stimulating use of interactivity (a common focus of UI design).
- Integrating visual aesthetics into every aspect of the website design, which might include communicating the business’ brand identity through color, fonts, logo, and imagery.
- Building a responsive website design that works beautifully across different devices and screen sizes, and adapts page content to create the best possible user experience on both small (mobile) and large (desktop) screens.
With these basic web design rules in mind, let’s now take a look at some examples of creative website design that tick all of the boxes above.
5 Inspiring Website Design Ideas
Looking for ultimate website design inspiration? Look no further than these 5 examples of creative website design, which offer design ideas for including interactivity, color, branding and beautiful imagery in your own website builder ideas.
1. The Power of Color: PEDEN+MUNK (Agency/Portfolio)
A bold and punchy use of color, typography, and video sets out the creative stall of director and photography duo Jen Munkvold and Taylor Peden.
This portfolio website uses creative website ideas that are, in essence, very simple—it’s all about prioritizing full-width imagery and using playful color contrast to keep the viewer engaged throughout the user journey.
This example of creative web design also translates seamlessly to mobile, creating a tableau of gallery images that sit alongside the agency’s signature logo type.
2. Quirky Illustration: Don’t Board Me (Pet Care Services)
The creative website design for pet care providers Don’t Board Me can’t fail to raise a smile! From the inspired use of quirky illustrations to the on-trend pink and red palette, this must be one of the best website design ideas for making potential customers feel completely immersed in the brand of the business.
The web designers have also enhanced the user journey by avoiding dull forms or a standard FAQs page, instead opting for colorful and illustrated slides that explain information in a kooky, super-cute fashion.
3. Subtle Interactivity: LVMH Prize (eCommerce/Fashion)
Established by the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the LVMH Prize showcases the work of emerging fashion designers, bringing their creative collections to a new audience.
The creative website design idea for hosting the prize contenders is to present collections in a minimal eCommerce format, allowing users to scroll through the designers and their creations in a subtly interactive format.
If you’re looking for page designing ideas for an eCommerce site that feels a little different and not in the usual boxy format, this creative web design layout is a great example of blending video and photography while still maintaining a clean, minimalist aesthetic.
4. Simple and Striking Page Layouts: Nord Quantique (Corporate/Research)
Quantum computer research might not be the first industry that comes to mind when thinking of creative web design, but the beautiful page layouts for Nord Quantique show how clear, colorful website branding can really keep the user engaged when faced with a new or complex topic.
Use of clean sans serif fonts, pop-out cards that condense snippets of information and data, and subtle page transition animations bring dynamism to this thoughtfully-designed website layout.
5. Beautiful and Minimal: Anai (Corporate/Manufacturing)
Minimalist website design ideas can lead to really beautiful and creative web design, as is the case with this website example from wood manufacturers Anai.
A calm and collected mood is set with a black and white color palette, serif typography, and atmospheric photography, which expands serenely and seamlessly as the user moves through the page designs.
Great website design inspiration for corporate websites that require a little more creativity and style than the norm.
License this image via Olga S L.
Key Elements and Principles of Website Design
In addition to the 4 basic web design rules covered earlier, experienced web designers also have tried-and-tested methods, tricks, and techniques for building fantastic website designs.
You can use some of these website design ideas in your own digital creations, to build interest and clickability into your web designs.
Some of the key elements and principles of successful website design include:
Color Psychology
On screens, colors are rendered as light-emitting RGB colors, giving colors a brighter, bolder appearance than on print designs. The best website designs make full use of this exaggerated form of color, using thoughtfully-considered color palettes to create an emotional effect on the viewer.
In other words, you can directly affect how a website user feels when they land on your website through use of color alone.
- Exploring Sensory Branding for Your Online Business
- The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Website Color Scheme (Plus 20 FREE Color Palettes)
Read up on the power of color psychology, and put some of these psychological principles into action to create a more targeted emotional web design.
If you want to make a consumer feel more likely to splash the cash, or a blog to have a calming, studious effect on readers, you can manipulate website colors to maximize these effects.
The ultra-colorful palette for Spotify Wrapped gives users an immediate impression of fun and energy, enticing clicks and lengthening engagement time.
White Space
White space, or negative space, refers to areas of your website layout which are empty of content or busy elements. These blank spaces build visual hierarchy on a creative website design, and also help to focus the eye on something important, such as a call-to-action (CTA) or headline message.
- Negative Space Photography: What It is and How to Use It
- Minimalist Graphic Design: Core Principals and Famous Examples
A common feature of minimalist design, white space is also the unsung hero of many of the best website designs online. It can feel brave to allow a website to feature space that is empty of content, but it really pays off in terms of how much more functional, clear, and aesthetically-pleasing your website design will be as a result.
Be courageous with your web design ideas, and bring the focus to only one or two key elements on a single page layout.
The luxury eCommerce website for Raymond Weil x Basquiat uses white space to draw attention to the product and art illustrations.
Nudging
UX design and UI design are two fields of web design that have emerged and evolved very rapidly in today’s fast-paced digital design industry.
UX (user experience) design focuses on improving the overall user experience of a website, while UI (user interface) design aims to make interactive interfaces as aesthetically-pleasing and intuitive as possible.
A key element of both UX and UI design is ‘nudging,’ which describes techniques used to ‘nudge’ the user more effectively towards an action, next step in a path, or end goal.
You can incorporate nudging into your web design by using directional photography or graphics (a good example would be images which literally point towards a button or menu item), encouraging scrolling through subtle animation or page transitions, and building plenty of prompts into your page designs.
A good example of a prompt would be a shopping basket that bounces or wobbles, encouraging the user to look towards the basket and complete the product purchase.
Nudging is particularly important for website designs that require visitors to complete a full journey, such as an eCommerce website or form-based web page.
Web Design Common Mistakes
Even with a set of basic web design principles on hand, it’s still possible to make mistakes when crafting and realizing your website design ideas. By remembering to always prioritize the user experience, you can usually sidestep any major pitfalls.
But keep these common mistakes in mind when working on your web design to avoid having to go back to the drawing board.
Common mistakes people make when designing a website
Although easily avoidable, it’s wise to know where an otherwise good website design can fall down before you start designing.
Some of the most common web design mistakes include:
- Using too much interactivity, animation, and/or flashing content: A website that hurts your eyes or provides too many visual distractions will lead to users clicking away pretty quickly. Keep it simple people!
- Neglecting accessibility and usability in your designs: Inadequate color contrast can make text difficult to read for visually-impaired users, while fussy mouse-hover graphics can create click-through difficulties.
- Creating an inconsistent feel across your website through lack of branding: Build a seamless, unified feel across your web pages by using consistent brand elements, such as the same color palette, fonts, and brand image styles.
Should I just pay someone to design my website?
Ah, the golden question of whether to take on the task of designing a website yourself, or to simply ask an expert to perform the task. With the principles (and common mistakes) covered above in mind, there’s no reason why you can’t design your own website.
Many website builders offer code-free, intuitive designing, such as Squarespace or Webflow, as well as website templates that require a little time for editing with your own content before you press the go-live button.
If you still feel you would benefit from the expertise of a contractor, you have a couple of options.
One is to hire a freelance web designer and web developer, with the web designer able to design the website and advise on style and aesthetics, while the web developer will be able to get your website coded up and hosted online.
Alternatively, a web design agency can offer a full-service package, likely for a higher fee, which will bring together a team of experts to create your website.
This might include web designers, UX designers, UI designers, developers, and possibly digital marketers who can focus on improving the SEO ranking of your new website.
More Resources for Creating Websites
Now that you have checked out the creative website design inspiration offered in this article, it’s likely you have some website design ideas of your own!
Put your interesting web design ideas into action with these resources for building successful website designs, from a step-by-step guide to designing an eCommerce site to how to use black backgrounds in your website designs to dramatic effect:
- How to Design an Ecommerce Website in 6 Easy Steps
- The 5 Best Black Website Designs You Want to Try Out Now
- The Complete Guide to Website and Blog Logo Design
- 10 Website Design Tips for Solopreneurs
- How to Refresh Your Website with Imagery and Color
License the cover image via Olga S L.
