After much ado over the last few years, the web design industry has finally come to a standstill, and that’s for good. Expert designers have finally realized it’s in the best interest of a site to get rid of unnecessary design elements. So they are resorting to minimalistic design trends again.
Some are construing it as going back to the root. If we put such expressions aside, then what we see is a set of practices that aims to increase the cleanliness of web design. Clean web design has become highly sought after for not distracting web visitors from the content and also for relying on a minimalistic approach that saves time and makes the entire work easy to accomplish.
In this article, we’ll pick the characteristics of a clean and fresh web design. After going through them, you yourself could decide how clean is your website.
The characteristics are
Big pictures, less content
There are sites that don’t have too many stuffy elements to them. The homepages of those sites display a big picture with some texts. Many of those sites can be scrolled down to the bottom so visitors could check their collection of products. Even though less, the content on such sites are informative.
Color variation
Splashes of color always make something decorative. Many clean designs have sprung up based on this idea. Some of them have a black and white color scheme with pale blue and gray accents. When the background is dark gray with gray and white lettering on it, it expresses a feel of street art or street photography. Sites with black and white background and blue and brown accents mostly belong to the tech niche. The experiments are still on and new color variations representing different genres are in the pipeline.
Highlighting the product/service
Certain sites are designed to highlight the products they sell. For instance, a clothing and garment company website can feature full page color-rich images of shirts and trousers with simple fonts such as verdana or sans serif. Such a design can hold the visitor’s attention and beseech him to stay on the page for long. A service based site such as one on photography can skip the portfolio page and display a large image, taken by the photographer and put the Hire Me text right underneath the image. This could also improve the CTR.
Bold design
Yes, clean design can be bold. The two essential elements of a bold design are big images on bold subjects and parallax design. Once these design elements are coupled with mouseover effect, it gets bolder and braver. Parallax design is indeed amazing as it creates a 3D effect when visitors scroll down to the bottom. It also allows the background to move slowly comparing to the foreground, so the brave design gets the attention of the visitors.
Highlighting the intersection
Clean design can be useful to show the skyscrapers. A high angle view of the enclaves where one could focus on the areas where two buildings intersect each other. By highlighting the intersection, the site earns applause from visitors. It could also be used to increase conversion as the site menu are placed right around the intersection so visitors notice them and click on them.
Sites with multimedia elements
Clean design is clearly not against putting multimedia elements on the site. A video can actually make or break a site, it all depends on how it’s being incorporated. If the video is resourceful and relevant to the site’s theme, if it’s on the homepage and not distracting and most importantly, if it tells the story of the brand, then it could surely enrich the site.
Two best practices when adding a video to the site are hosting it on a good server and adding a professional touch to it by working out the crucial areas such as storyboarding, casting and art direction. This way, you can make sure the cleanliness of the site will stay unaffected, and the visitors to the site will be impressed.
There are more characteristics of a clean website, but the ones discussed above are the easiest to implement and graspable to even those, who have zero clue of design related technicalities. Check your site and see how many of these characteristics it has. The more, the merrier.
