Website Design - Less Is More

by BANG! Website Design • May 06, 2016

Today's post on web design was inspired by a blog post written by Erika Dickstein that was published on the Huffington Post website titled The Business of the Brain on the Internet: The Luxury Effect. Feel free to take a look at her post as she makes some really valid points about design, perceived value and simplifying design and removing choices to draw focus to what's left. For example in the photo below, even though the snail only consumes a small portion of the space, since the background around it is soft and muted, the sharp focus and color contrast of the snail makes it the obvious point of attention.

Negative Space in Web Design

On a Web page, you can achieve a similar affect by making the most important thing on the page stand out. Your calls to action for instance as shown in the sample below.

Killer Web Design

Any question what this website designer wants you to do next? One very graphic image, 4 words, and a button. Simple, sharp (pun intended) and straight to the point.

Now those of you that know a typical BANG! Web Site Design project know that this is far from typical for us. This is definitely "Do as we say, not do as we do". We are generally so focused on SEO and search rankings that we put a 1,000 words on the page to gain Google's favor. If that text was put at the top of the page it would totally ruin this simple, less is more web design. But... if we put it below the scroll and out of sight, we achieve the same visual effect, and still get our search rankings.

The blog post that inspired me shares that by focusing on just one thing on the page, we simplify choices and decisions that site visitors need to make in order to move forward. On the sample web page above, it's click and move forward or hit your back button. It doesn't get much simpler or cleaner decision wise.

Current web design trends have tended towards flat, simple, clean designs yet we generally clutter them up with lots of text and images. Let's think simple on your next project. Rather than paragraphs and paragraphs of text (like this blog post) let's think bullet points...
 
  • Clean and Simple
  • Clear Calls to Action
  • Click Here or Go Home

So what do you say? Ready for a simpler approach to Web design? Click the big button below... (or go home).
Web Design - Simple & Big or Go Home!



 

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