Web design has played a crucial role in reflecting a company's brand and conveying its information. A good web design will help build a brand image, attract a more targeted audience and offer them a nice user experience, thus building a long-lasting relationship between the clients and the company. If you are a newcomer having no idea about what web design is or what tools you can use for designing a good website, here is everything you need to know.

What is Web Design

Web Design literally means a process of designing the visual look of websites, aiming to offer the users a good experience. It includes many different aspects, such as user interface design, web graphic design, user experience design and search engine optimization. At first, it just simply refers to website designing for desktop browsers, and now design for mobile phones has become increasingly important in recent years.

Web design is a reflection of a company's brand and information. As a designer, what you need to focus on is a mix of aesthetics, functionality and user experience rather than just pay attention to colors or layouts. Designers have to think about what kinds of design can make the operation easier and more convenient for the audience, how they could help the audience to acquire the information they need and how to attract user's attention and improve user experience. Only in this way can you design an attractive, functional and engaging website.

The Difference between Web Design and Web Development

As a novice, you might feel a bit confused to figure out the difference between web design and web development. In fact, these two terms have their own function and purpose and require different skills.

As I just mentioned above, web design, in short, means designing the look of a website. Designers mainly give priority to the user experience and visual elements like color palettes, logo design and layout, information flow and so on. Their final goal is to design a visually attractive and appealing website for the audience and improve their user experience. Good website design will give users a better experience and retain targeted audiences.

Generally speaking, web development refers to making these design ideas come to life by writing codes. Web development is typically divided into two main parts: front-end (client-side) and back-end (server-side). Like front-end developers, they will focus on the technical side, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or anything else to bring web designs to life, display the designer's concepts and make the website functional. The back-end developer will center on the management of the data within the website's database and make sure that data can be displayed on the website's front end.

The Importance of Web Design

The first sight of the website will influence how your audience views your website, perceives your brand and how they made judgments about it. It is necessary to improve the first impression the website has left on others. Especially for new users, it might be the first time for them to get to know your brands by viewing your website. It is really important to think about what kinds of brand image you want to show to your audience, so web design has become increasingly important to let your audiences know who you are and how to get their likes or let them identify with the brand. All the design elements the designers choose, including the color scheme, the fonts, the position of different buttons and the function design, will make your brand identity. Only when your web design is attractive enough will the audience visit your page and business, otherwise they might get off your website immediately, regarding it as a waste of time if they find the web design boring or plain, difficult to use, or just dislike the content.

The Key Benefits of Good Web Design

A good web design will help a lot to attract a more targeted audience. It is undoubtedly acknowledged that a good website design should look simple and appealing, have clear navigation and be easy to operate, etc. All of these features will make users keep using them. Here are a few key benefits of good web design.

Consistent Branding

Good web design helps strengthen brand image. Web design is a reflection of the brand and company, particularly its values. The website shows the audience what information they would like to convey and what values they advance for on their website via different elements and design, which helps enterprises to build and strengthen their brand image. In this way, the brand will leave a deep, consistent, and long-lasting impression on its targeted audience. So it makes it easier to navigate and helps customers more clearly identify the visual elements of a brand as a specific company and its products or services.

SEO Optimization

Good web design also helps promote SEO optimization. Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a process to improve the visibility and ranking of a website in search engine results pages (SERP). It is an effective way to increase your ranking and market your brand. In Web design, codes have carried information in a way that search engines can read, which enables website owners to boost business because the site shows up on the top search result pages, helping people to find it.

Customer Satisfaction

Professional web design helps increase customer satisfaction. It will build a positive relationship between the brand and visitors for a long time because clear and helpful navigation could help visitors look for the information they need as quickly as possible. This will leave a really good and positive impression on visitors and advance customer satisfaction, hence increasing its brand loyalty.

Improve Sales

A perfect and easy-understanding web design will better promote the sales of the company's business, because all the design elements, including the appealing visual look, simple layout, brilliant color schemes, and easy operation, all of them will drive customers to make a deal. A professional designer will reduce the barriers or difficulties that customers might encounter, or at least keep optimizing the website to avoid these situations to make the trade smooth and quick, thus improving sales.

Comprehensive Tools Used for Web Design

In this part, we will introduce several comprehensive tools that might be helpful for novices to create a web design. There are so many kinds of these products for use, which will greatly improve your efficiency. With these tools, you don't have to design a website from scratch but choose some templates or AI-power assistance built into these tools and make some adjustments or call for customized service. In this way, you can immediately create a tailored website in a short time.

Wegic

Firstly, I would like to introduce Wegic. It is an AI-powered website builder and is really easy to understand and use, especially for those who do not have much experience in designing or coding. With the support of AI assistance, what you need to do is just tell the AI what kinds of websites you would like to create, the themes, the color scheme and more details you prefer.

As the picture is shown below, if you have never used Wegic before, you can try to create a new account. Then you will enter into such a new page as below, and type your personal needs in the chat box. Soon, a new and creative website that matches your tailored needs will be generated for you. You can also chat with an AI assistant and customize your website if you are not satisfied with the result. Just tell the assistant how to modify and make changes to meet your needs.

Wix

Wix is also a comprehensive useful tool for web design. It is equipped with more than 900 free and customizable templates for designers to choose from or the users can start from a blank Canva in their website builder. Each person using these tools has their own purpose and goals. To meet personal needs, Wix offers multiple customized services like an intuitive drag-and-drop website editor, which makes it easier and quicker to meet your personal needs. There are more than 1000’s of advanced web design capabilities. Also, the built-in SEO tools could help optimize your search engine and increase your website visibility. Not only that, you can also use its built-in marketing tools to grow and expand your reach.

Sketch

Sketch is the all-in-one platform for digital design — with collaborative design tools, prototyping, and developer handoff. It helps users to produce large-scale beautiful content and it mainly focuses on interface and user experience design with special prototyping and collaboration features. It has already become a very useful and common design tool among professional UI/UX designers who are trying to generate mockups, wireframes, and prototypes of high quality. This tool has a great number of advantages for designers. For example, it offers an intuitive interface and expansive plugin ecosystem that meet various needs and improve the efficiency and creativity of the designers. Not only that, it allows real-time collaboration among team members and provides a comprehensive set of tools to help designers produce delicate and complicated designs and layouts. All of these features streamline the work process and enhance workflow.

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive website builder built for designers. Precision is one of its biggest features and Webflow also provides some classic and precise design tools. Actually, its targeted users probably are professional designers with rich experience and design knowledge. So it might be difficult and very frustrating to use for average users, especially for newcomers without any web design background as this tool is originally designed for web developers. So, if you are a beginner, it’s worth taking a look in Webflow’s help center called Webflow University, considered as a guideline for newcomers to see whether there are functions you need. This will save you time trying to find a feature you think should be really simple to locate.

This web design tool offers a great level of design customization without having to know code, which is friendly for those designers who have no coding background. It also has a great range of templates suitable for e-commerce and dynamic content.

Figma

Figma, as a free web design tool, is of great importance and popularity among designers. It is hard to overstate its influence on good UI and UX. Nearly everything that designers and developers need is available in Figma. You can use Figma in your browser for free, but a free version is limited. Ease to use is one of its advantages. As long as you know how to position and resize shapes and lines, then you can use it easily.  Users can create wireframes and prototypes effortlessly before full development begins

It also allows online collaboration, which helps a lot to promote efficiency and streamline workflow. It also allows users to keep track of the progress of the design status. Team members can keep informed of the real-time status and what has been changed or completed. In addition, it enables the whole team to talk and communicate via audio or chat box quickly, which makes sure they can receive feedback or comments as soon as possible, thus improving work efficiency.

FAQs

What are the 3 types of web design?

They are static web design, dynamic web design, and eCommerce web design.

Is Web design hard to study?

Becoming a web designer involves developing various technical skills and knowledge. However, nowadays we have so many brilliant website design tools to choose from. What is more? These website builders have provided a great number of powerful tools for use, including diverse templates, useful plugins, and AI-powered assistance like Wegic. Making good use of these tools will reduce some challenges and difficulties you might face. What matters more is whether you have a strong interest and passion for website design and whether you could insist on it. As long as you would like to keep learning designing knowledge as well as technical skills and make full use of these tools, web design would not be very difficult to study.

What are the major steps to designing a website?

Web designing consists of six steps as follows:

• Figure out your goal behind designing a website
• Defining your scope
• Making a sitemap and wireframe
• Creating the content and visual elements for your website
• Testing your web design
• Launching the website with the newly designed elements

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