Can Web Design be Optimized?

Web design is not an easy task to tackle, but it is a field that has seen a lot of change in the past decade or so. Websites have been designed with speed and optimization in mind while also being aesthetically pleasing since the earliest days of web design. This article discusses how websites can be optimized using various methods to ensure they will meet target goals. Optimization is more than just website load times and improvements can extend all the way down to font sizes, text spacing, and color palettes. Further articles on this topic are discussed at the end which will help you navigate ideas for your own website if you decide to develop one for yourself or your company.

This article will look at this question in three ways:

How to choose a site design for your business Web design optimization with CSS Tutorial on how to make your own website

Choose a good site design for your business

The first step in any web design project is learning to love the site you are working on. One shouldn't make this process harder by devoting too much time and energy to finding the perfect site design before considering how you can improve its performance. This article gives some pointers about picking the right type of site and Facebook's recent changes to their website have shown us that changing designs often will have an effect on page load times. 

A useful tool is Google's analytics report (available at https://developers.google.com/ Semantics/SiteAudienceOverview#AudienceOverview ) which gives you the option to compare your site's performance to the rest of the world. You can decide how important it is that your website meets a particular metric and how much you'd like to improve it. As a web designer, it is worthwhile considering which metrics are most important to your business and discovering other sites that have performed better in this metric than yours. Your site will have better load time if it contains more content or linking pages, or if there are fewer links leading back to it from other websites and you can use this information for comparison when you think about improving your site's design.

If you are planning on creating a new website, take the time to consult stock websites of businesses similar to yours. Researching these types of websites can help you determine the type of site that will most appeal to your target audience as well as how best to make your own website as attractive and useful as possible.

Tools for optimizing your site design

"CSS?" you might be asking.  The topic of CSS optimization has been around for over a decade, and there are many methods available on the web. Optimizing CSS design is not always easy when you first begin, so here I give some quick tips and tricks that I have found useful over the years.

Logo graphic files

Many businesses find their logo is a key part of their brand. Logos are often used as a favicon for homepage bookmarking, in emails and on printed materials. This means that the size of your logo file can have an effect on loading time and overall design if it is displayed in multiple places on your site.  To optimize the size of your logo graphic files you can use online tools such as this one: http://www.re-scripter.com/online-tools/image-resizer/ which allows you to choose how much size to decrease the resolution by while still keeping the image recognizable.

Fonts

Of all the art created for a website font sizes should be least optimized. It is true that large font sizes will draw more attention than small ones, but this quality comes at a cost. Fonts are worth optimizing if they are used frequently throughout your site and you know that your visitors will have problems seeing them on their mobile devices or if they do not have an HD resolution display. A useful tool is Similarweb's online font size analyzer ( https://www.similarweb.com/mobile-fonts/ ) which allows you to see the biggest difference between a site's font size on different devices, or compare two sites and see which sites offer larger fonts on mobile devices  (touch screen smartphones).

Font spacing

How much space is between letters and words can affect how easy it is to read a site. Font spacing that is too wide or too narrow can make a site look amateurish and without proper optimization your visitors may spend less time on your site than they normally would. A useful tool for checking font spacing is http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/text-shadow-generator  which allows you to see different font sizes along with their corresponding shadow effect if desired.

Color Palette

Color choice has a lot of potential when looking to improve the performance of your website, especially in regards to load times on different screen resolutions and devices. Websites with a large number of colors will take longer to load than those with fewer colors, but the difficulty of working with less colors may encourage designers to optimize their choices which will improve site performance. Checking your color palette on a variety of devices and screen resolutions can give useful data about the ease of reading text as well as how well your site performs overall. An interesting tool that may be useful for you is: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/web-design-process--optimizing-your-palette--cms-2145 which allows you to choose colors from an image and shows their use in that image so that you can see how they are used in context before choosing them for your website design.

Useful websites

Knowing how to optimize your site's design involves looking at the overall performance of your site, the size and number of image files and the performance of fonts. This can be a daunting process, so here are some helpful tools to get you started:

Similarweb: https://www.similarweb.com/ Similarweb gives you in depth information on popular sites and their design. Not only does it tell you about the types of design used, but it also gives various statistics on traffic as well as where that traffic comes from and where it goes after landing on the page. You should take advantage of this tool when choosing a website design for your own business enterprise. Google Page Insights: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/page-speed   This site is for webmasters, but provides valuable information to site owners as well. It gives suggestions for improving your website's performance and contains plugins you can use on Google Chrome to see how long it takes your website to load and how much bandwidth it uses. It also allows you to see the number of mobile devices that visit your page, so if you have optimized fonts or color palette this tool will allow you to check if the changes are effective on non-desktop devices as well Bitly: https://bitly.com/ Bitly has a lot of options for optimizing sites that can be useful. It offers statistics on how many visitors experience a broken link on your site. It also gives you the option of setting up an affiliate program for your business, which will show you how many people are clicking the links on your site to go to other companies' websites.

Images will always be one of the most important things to consider when it comes to website design optimization. You should make sure that there is minimal space between characters, words and lines as well as adjust your logo graphic files and font sizes when necessary. The best way to optimize images is by using online tools that allow you to re-size graphics into smaller file sizes while still keeping them recognizable.

Conclusion

Optimizing a website design involves making an effort to use the best practices and techniques that are out there in order to give the users of your site the best experience possible. This will, in turn, encourage better traffic, which in turn will bring more customers to your business. There are many tools out there that allow you to do this and choosing the right ones for yourself can make all the difference.

Updated: Nov 21st 2017

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