Top 9 Pro-Tips For Web Designers | MedRec Technologies

Web designers contribute to a development team by helping bring to life the all-important human interface.

By combining a strong knowledge of design and coding, web designers can create beautiful experiences that draw in users while helping maintain a project's technical integrity.

Their day-to-day tasks include creating wireframes, understanding how users will interact with the site and what their needs are, ensuring the project runs smoothly on multiple browsers and devices, improving user experience (UX) by making improvements to user interface (UI), among other tasks.

With so many hats to wear, web designers can easily get lost in minutiae that detract from their work. We asked web designers to share what they think are the most important pro-tips for new and aspiring web designers.

In this blog, you will learn about some of the best tips to enhance your skills as a web designer and take your work to another level. Many factors go into successful design projects; below are 9 tips for web designers looking to get started or improve their craft.

1. Understand your tools

A great designer knows their palette. You can't paint without brushes, and you can't create effective designs without the proper software. Choose a toolkit that fits your needs; whether it's Photoshop or Sketch, understanding how to use the tools within will improve every design you touch.

Understanding your tools will help you to be efficient and streamlined with your design. Moreover, when you know your tool inside our, you can use it to build excellent user interfaces that boost your user experience. The features of your tools can be used to the fullest only when you know there is a feature that exists. Thus, make it a point to study it carefully.

2. Create interfaces not pages

Interfaces are the digital world's version of a good conversationalist. They draw you in with their charm and keep you enraptured with their wit. Designers can create interfaces by focusing on a single cohesive thought or idea, instead of pushing out a design for each individual page. If it helps get you from point A to point B faster, it's an interface.

This will help to avoid the temptation of making aesthetically pleasing pages and rather focus on facilitating ease to the user. You can design something that has great navigation and content, but if it doesn't help your users accomplish what they want to do, then you're doing something wrong. If something is tiring or burdensome to use, then your user will lose interest quickly. Hence, it is important to focus on the interface and its efficiency.

3. Less is more

The best designs are stripped down to the essentials. There's no such thing as a perfect design, but designers can get closer by acknowledging that less is more. This doesn't mean you should use only one font and one color throughout your entire website; it means you should focus on the most important elements of each page, and design accordingly.

When you implement the rule of less is more, you automatically get rid of anything that distracts the user. Make sure you don't add too many elements to confuse the user. Follow the platform conventions and make sure the pattern sticks with what the user expects across platforms.

4. Design for your target audience

Research who you're designing for in order to create a product that's useful, easy to understand, and straightforward. You can't please everyone all the time, but if you try to think like your users do (without spending all day on their site), you're going to have a much better chance of creating a site that people appreciate. If you can't put yourself in your target audience's shoes, find out what they want and need from your site so you know how to provide it for them.

Being able to empathize with your target audience is the key to being able to make a user-friendly design. This will keep the user engaged with your product and it will also improve their experience as well as yours. Moreover, it will help you understand their issues and pain points better to resolve them on time.

5. Utilize white space

White space also referred to as negative space, isn't just the blank area around images and text on a web page. In design terms, it's the emptiness that adds to the functionality of a site or product. It makes things easier to read, to navigate, and overall improves the overall user experience.

You can utilize the white space efficiently by adding more content based on your keywords and by shortening the length of your pages. Just by adding more space to your web pages, you can actually improve their readability and understandability.

<a href='https://www.freepik.com/photos/website-wireframe'>Website wireframe photo created by rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com</a>

6. Make your CSS work for you

In order to keep your code from becoming convoluted and hard to read, use CSS.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it's what you should use instead of HTML to control the look, feel, font size, font color, and so on of your site. This makes it easier to update the appearance of your site without changing interesting things coded into the HTML structure.

Using CSS will benefit you because it is better for search engines since your pages have a higher semantic value. Your visitors will thank you because the information on your site will be presented in a more appealing and functional manner.

7. Make your layouts easy to edit

If you're planning on having other people contribute content to your site or if there's any chance that it might need updating, make sure the layout is easy to edit. That means using simple HTML tags like divs and tables, not things like Flash because it is notorious for being difficult to edit. As mentioned earlier, CSS is also a better alternative.

Making layouts easy to edit eliminates the possibility of errors and reduces the time it takes to make changes. This tip is especially applicable for freelance designers who submit their design projects to their clients. In such a scenario, it is fundamental to have a layout that is easy to edit. It will not only make a good impression on you but will also demonstrate your organizational skills.

8. Importance of text

As a designer, it is highly crucial to be able to choose a font in alignment with your user-experience goals. If you want to give your user a seamless digital reading experience, sans-serif is preferred any day. However, if you wish for a more aesthetic experience, make sure to use the classic serif fonts. And if you want people to think you're a design nerd, you can throw in 'Courier New'.

Fonts play a crucial role to convey your message. Make sure your font isn't too complicated like cursive or calligraphy since they can deteriorate the user's readability. In addition, be mindful of the font size as well because massive font sizes play a major role in making your audience feel uneasy. A font size of 12px is recommended for optimal readability.

9. Beware of the "text-jerk"

Remember that really annoying kid in middle school who passed around those comic strips he made and would laugh super loud when he got to certain words?

Text-jerk refers to the act of using humorous, ironic, or otherwise weird words. As a reader, it looks unprofessional and it's hard to read. While it may seem like an easy way to get a cheap laugh, there are other ways you can achieve the same effect without having to resort to text-jerk. If you insist on using this method though, just know the response will be the exact opposite of what was intended.

Don't make your website a text-jerk by using all uppercase letters. Also, try to avoid other types of text jerky such as using too many exclamation points or intentionally misspelling words for no apparent reason.

Instead, you can try other techniques such as using your entire website as a single image or completely taking over the web browser window to make it impossible for the user to exit without rolling over every single letter on their keyboard.

So remember: the best way to avoid being a text-jerk is by not being a text-jerk.

Conclusion

Having read about these tips, we hope you now have a good understanding of what is the right thing to do and what is to be avoided.

Web design ain't easy, but these nine tips will help bring your designs to the next level.

We assure you if you implement these suggestions in your designs today, it will help you enhance the UX and satisfaction.

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