Website Design Guidelines: A Comprehensive Report for Web Development

This report provides a comprehensive overview of website design guidelines, emphasizing the importance of user experience and usability. It begins with an introduction to the concept of design guidelines and their role in bridging design principles and implementation standards. The report details the research approach, which involves analyzing blogs, examining websites with good design quality, and reviewing articles on website design principles. The core of the report outlines key guidelines, including simplicity, visual hierarchy, navigation, consistency, accessibility, and conventionality, along with justifications for each. Simplicity advocates for minimal color usage and legible typography, while visual hierarchy emphasizes the arrangement of elements for immediate user understanding. The report stresses the importance of intuitive navigation, consistent design across pages, and responsive design for accessibility. The justification section further explains how these guidelines contribute to user satisfaction, ease of use, and effective communication. The report concludes by highlighting the critical nature of website design, emphasizing that a well-designed website is crucial for user engagement. It also acknowledges the limitations of the study and suggests further exploration of additional design principles to enhance user experience. Finally, the report provides a bibliography of relevant sources.

Running head: WEBSITE DESIGN GUIDELINES
Website Design Guidelines
Name of the Student
Name of the University

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Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................2
Research Approach:.........................................................................................................................2
Guidelines:.......................................................................................................................................3
Justification for Guidelines:.............................................................................................................5
Conclusion:......................................................................................................................................6
Bibliography:...................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction:
The design guidelines are considered to be a collection of recommendations for
practicing good guidelines. The purpose of the guidelines is to share clear guidelines to the
designers. These guidelines are for adopting particular principles such as learnability,
consistency, efficiency and intuitiveness. The design guidelines are used in between the design
principles and implementation standards. Thus a design guideline enhance the designer
understanding of implementation principle. This understanding remove any obstacle in the path
of the designer’s creativity even the design constraints. Various sources can force a design
guideline to emerge. These guidelines are often contradictory but this conflict allows the
designer to create new and effective designs.
Within the study various website design guidelines have been represented. The
justification of stating those guidelines have also been proposed.
Research Approach:
Various research approaches has been taken for identifying the quality design principles.
The first approach is reading various blogs that share the information of design principles. The
Various blogs represent information on the design principles. A set of common design principles,
described within the blogs have been represented, are considered to be important and noted
down. The second approach is accessing various websites with good design quality.
Understanding the practice approach of the designs is the best way to learn about the design
principles. The noted design principles are analyzed using the examples in the websites that have
been accessed. This has provided an opportunity of underrating the real world implementation of

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the collected design principles. Few of the designs that are attractive are not mentioned in any of
the blogs.
In order to understand the underlying theories of that designs, reading the articles on
website design principles is required. Various articles were being collected form the online
library googlescholer. All the data collected from the articles has been a great source of verifying
and analyzing the design principles that have been collected form several blogs. The articles that
has been read are consisting of various examples of real world implications of the design
principles. These implications have been analyzed and matched with the designs discovered in
the accessed websites. Then the approach of noting and identifying the gaps in the design has
been considered. Based on the design principle and implications of that principles, the website
designs have been examined. The flaws in the design have been recorded and solution to that
errors have been discovered. After finding a set of conventional guidelines and identifying new
guidelines to remove the design errors, a set of well-defined and effective design principles have
been created. The whole approach has been divided into three steps such as collecting, analyzing
and creating.
Guidelines:
Simplicity: A website design must not use too much of color in the pages. It is best to use
two more or less amount of colors in the website designing. The best way to put colors in the
website is to use same color in the sections which delivers same message or goal. The typefaces
that a designer chooses must be legible at the very least. Usage of too much of color in the
typefaces should be avoided. The best option is to make use of three different typefaces in three
different sizes at max. In terms of using a graphics, it needs to be identified that a using graphics

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is assisting a user to complete a specific task or not. If not then the designer should not be using
graphics.
Visual Hierarchy: This design principle is closely connected to the design principle
called simplicity. The visual hierarchy design principle is the way of arranging the elements in
such way that the user instantly sees the important parts of the website. This is a simple approach
in theory but a critical one to implement as various elements are used in a site and prioritizing the
elements based on importance is a tough process.
Navigation: For optimizing the site’s navigation, it is crucial to keep the basic structure
of the navigation as simple as possible. Moreover, the designer must always put the navigation
menu at the top section of the page. The designer must put the navigation links at the footer also.
The designers must use the breadcrumbs in every page except the home page. Searching the
desired piece of information through searching is a great way of increasing usability. The search
bar should be positioned in the top of the site.
Consistency: The designer must understand that the user must feel like he is in the same
website while roaming around the site. The design needs to be consistent throughout the pages of
the site. The background, color, typefaces and other elements needs to be of same tone. The
layout of the pages is not required to be same for all the pages but the pages that send same
message to the user needs to be of same layout.
Accessibility: The main focus of the designers need to be focused on providing the best
experience to the users. The website must be created with responsive design guidelines. The
images must be responsive along with the other elements of the site. The design will be created
so that it can support cross platforms.

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Conventionality: This design principle guideline entails that the main navigation menu
needs to be at the top or left side of the site. To have a logo of the organization (who’s website it
is) at the top-left corner of the site. The logo should be linked to the home page so that visitor
may get back to the home page by clicking on that logo.
Justification for Guidelines:
Simplicity: It needs to be considered that a user is not coming to the site to appreciate the
design quality though the feel and look of the site is vital. The users comes to the site to find
some information or with the purpose of carrying out some functions. Adding additional piece of
information (or it can be said as unnecessary) only makes it hard for a user to access the required
information or function. Additional colors or other elements only distract the user form the main
purpose. According to the UX and usability perspective, simplicity is the best way of designing
websites.
Visual Hierarchy: It is to be remembered that in terms of user interaction and usability
optimization, the main objective of a designer should be on directing the users in the way of
desired actions. The main factor in this design principle is that this whole process needs to be
feel natural to the user. This will attract the user interest in the sections that a designer wants to
promote more.
Navigation: Navigation is a crucial part of user interaction and usability. Having an
intuitive navigation within the website is a vital factor. This ensures that the user can find the
required piece of information easily. The navigation design principle has been defined such a
way that a visitor needs not be indulge in the thoughts of what to click next. Providing too much
of navigation options within a page confuses the user.

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Consistency: Using similar layout in the similar pages makes the understanding of the
information that have been conveyed in the page easier for the visitor. Using the same color,
typefaces, background and other elements allow the website to have a better grip on the visitor
interest.
Accessibility: As stated by comScore, tablet web utilization grew 30% between 2013
Furthermore 2015. Smartphone web consumption, In grew 78% Throughout those same time
period. Those takeaway here: in place to furnish An positively great client experience, your
webpage necessities to a chance to be perfect with those diverse units (and operating systems,
Furthermore browsers) that your guests would utilizing.
Conventionality: Same time it might a chance to be enticing on have at such outline
assemblies crazy those window to the purpose for continuously totally first or unique, this might
(likely) a chance to be a misstep. It would make associated to setting a car's guiding wheel in the
backseat, which may be on say; it might confound individuals.
Conclusion:
Form the above study it can be concluded that the website design is a critical as well as a
simple task. The process may seem like simpler that the actual development but the ideas behind
the design must be as complex as the development. No matter how good the backend coding is,
there no chance of getting good response from users if the site is not well designed. The usability
and the user interaction is the key point of all the website designing process. Therefore, it obliges
further extension by applying extra sub social qualities and also those Confirmation What's more
legitimacy starting with the nearby consumers, web designers and associations. The design
principles that have been represented within the study is compact and accurate. Not all the design

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principles that are required to build a site has been discussed. However, the study has
incorporated all the information that are required to understand the discussed design principles.
This design guidelines can be followed during wire framing, mockup designing and user
interface designing.

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Bibliography:
Karsai, G., Krahn, H., Pinkernell, C., Rumpe, B., Schindler, M. and Völkel, S., 2014. Design
guidelines for domain specific languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.2378.
Kranz, J., Herzog, D. and Emmelmann, C., 2015. Design guidelines for laser additive
manufacturing of lightweight structures in TiAl6V4. Journal of Laser Applications, 27(S1),
p.S14001.
Montgomery, D.C., 2017. Design and analysis of experiments. John wiley & sons.