Website design has come a long way since the early days of the internet. These days, businesses need websites that display their personality and establish authority. However, despite the abundance of web design best practices information out there, some common design mistakes continue to occur.
While some of these issues are caused by site owners’ ignorance of best practices, a bunch of them are created unwittingly by designers due to the constraints of the software they’re working with. With this in mind, WordPress website design software Elementor has released a Full Site Kits feature that allows creators to export and apply proven designs to new websites.
Here are 3 common design challenges that can be easily solved using Full Site Kits.
Lack of Structure
One of the most common issues website visitors face is not knowing where to look. There are pop ups, lightboxes, design elements on sidebars, and main columns to look at. The experience can be a bit disconcerting since the overall effect is one of non-cohesiveness. This hardly helps build authority in the mind of the user.
Good planning helps solve most of these issues. A wireframe that adheres to brand guidelines and delivers the desired message is a good place to begin. Website owners often lack resources and time to dive into the wireframing process. They tend to eyeball other attractive websites and try to replicate those designs for their websites.
What ends up happening is they overdesign their site. For instance, they add too many columns and web assets that slow page performance. Elementor’s Full site Kits solve this problem thanks to pre-packaged templates that are designed for industry verticals.
For instance, a consulting business website has very different requirements from a pet grooming business’ website. Elementor has created over 80 design templates for industries that not only minimize the load a page has to bear but are visually stunning as well.
Needless to say, site owners and designers can customize these templates to create even better designs. From a designer’s perspective, these templates give them a great first draft or springboard to present to clients, thus eliminating the need to wireframe every element and design them from scratch.
The result is a stunning website that can be created in far less time than it would normally take.
Too Many Features
Web design software offers a ton of asset options to designers and site owners. The problem is that most businesses don’t need them. For instance, splash pages look great and are a cool element, but they ultimately add little to the user’s experience. It can be tough to ignore the allure of these sexy features at the end of the day.
Most websites are also overloaded with autoplay features that detract from performance. How often have you visited a webpage only for a video tucked away in a corner to start playing at full volume? It takes most users a while to locate the culprit and disable it. By that point in time, the user has typically lost interest and bounces.
Google and other search engines place a premium on on-page experience, and high bounce rates aren’t good for a website’s SEO rankings. Using the Full site Kits feature, designers can rely on templates that have been pre-verified for SEO compatibility and performance.
For instance, unless a designer disables the option, all videos and images are loaded only on click when a user lands on the page. This means static thumbnails are displayed for videos, and images are loaded only on click. This reduces the load a page has to bear and improves performance immeasurably.
The result is a website that ranks well because Google considers page loading speeds as a factor in SEO rankings as well.
Inconsistent Fonts and Colors
A common complaint owners have is dealing with inconsistent branding throughout their web assets. Websites are complex things, and brand imagery, fonts, and color schemes have to remain consistent across all pages.
Elementor allows designers to set global font and color schemes that ensure consistency throughout all web assets. What’s more, designers can export their creations with a single click to a ZIP file and apply them to new designs.
For instance, if a client wants to design 2 websites with the same brand libraries, designers can define variables in the first design and simply export them to the second. There’s no need to recreate the first, which eliminates a possible source of errors.
Defining global variables like this also prevents the need for HTML requests that reduce page load speeds. The result is a fast website out of the box that designers can add value to instead of recreating completely.
Design Simplified
The Full Site Kits feature in Elementor’s software is bound to change the way designers and website owners look at WordPress design. Thanks to easy exportability and performance-enhancing features built into templates, designers have less to worry about when beginning a new project.
By delivering high-quality websites quickly, designers can now ensure client needs are met at all times, while website owners can depend on websites that adhere to best practices.
