An effective website design should serve its purpose by expressing its specific message while also engaging the visitor. A good website design incorporates several elements such as consistency, colors, typography, imagery, simplicity, and functionality.  Many important factors influence how a website is perceived when it is designed. A well-designed website can aid in the development of trust and guide visitors to take action. Making sure your website design is optimized for usability (form and aesthetics) and how easy it is to use is part of creating a great user experience (functionality).  Here are some guidelines to consider when planning your next web project.  Clear Added Value Every well-designed website meets the needs of its visitors. And having a very clear purpose is the best way to create a website that caters to users. Web designers make certain that every site, page, and section they work on has a clear and specific purpose that it seeks to address. This can range from providing information and entertainment to allowing interaction and completing a transaction.  Websites that are overcrowded and over-designed do not work. Too many elements on a single page only cause distraction and confusion. Great web design, such as this example from Fly Hyer, is thus not only clean and simple, but also purposeful and built to fit exactly what the user wants.  Loading Speed Even if every aspect of your site serves a purpose, if it takes too long to load, it is effectively useless to the user. The problem is that in our culture of little time and plenty of options, if a website doesn’t load almost instantly, very few users will stick around to wait.  Fortunately, there is no shortage of tools and tricks that designers and website owners can use to improve the loading time of their sites in order to meet these user expectations. Optimizing image sizes, combining code into a single CSS or JavaScript file, and minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are some of the best ways to improve page load times.  GTMetrix is a useful tool to check the speed of your website.   Communication Clear and consistent communication is an important principle of web design. Users want information quickly, so no matter the medium, your message must be simple and easy to understand. For menus and graphical elements, for example, this entails organizing information hierarchically, whereas, for content, it entails making good use of bullet points and subheadings.  Easy to understand, but all the more difficult.  Typography Typography is frequently overlooked in terms of its impact on a website’s overall success.  If your website masters the fundamentals of typography, it will be far ahead of the competition. To begin, Sans Serif fonts (contemporary-looking fonts without decorative finishes) such as Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are the easiest to read online. The recommended font size is 16px. A maximum of three-point sizes is also recommended for a streamlined design. Similarly, no more than three typefaces should be used across headings, body text, and elements such as buttons.  A good example is the website of Black Estate Vineyard. Normally, black backgrounds on websites instantly indicate some shady intentions. In this case, the clear white text works very well and uses the brand colors effectively and appealingly. The contrast also enhances readability.   Mobile Friendly  The responsive design used to be optional for effective web design. Today, if your website is not available across multiple devices and multiple screen sizes, it’ll struggle to not only attract users but also rank well on Google. To make your website mobile-friendly, the easiest place to start is from scratch by rebuilding it with a responsive layout. Otherwise, you can create a dedicated mobile site that is separate from your main site and specifically optimized for mobile users.  With the growing use of smartphones, tablets, and now phablets, making your website fit for mobile users is a must. From there, your site is improved by UX Designers.