Prelude

Well, this hot topic always has pros and cons for every single netizen. And the best website design topic always comes to my mind from time to time. Since this is a hard topic to discuss. Especially for the author (me) who still have tons to learn.

How to Determine

For me, the best website design is not just about releasing the best graphics you have or making a great content. The best website design is making a sustainable website from concept to evaluation, then making a better concept again and get an evaluation again. It's an eternal cycle to make innovation in every moment.

"But why?"

There are a lot of writing-post that said simple is better. Responsive design must be implemented to your website. And many more. But if you just follow the stream without even know what you are doing, then it will be a catastrophe to your website and even your company as well.

Simple website design is not always the best. There are also people who prefer to use a website that contains full information. Let's say we need Wikipedia to learn something. But you know what, the website design of Wikipedia doesn't really change since I knew this informative website. The website gives a lot of words and we have rarely seen pictures.

Or perhaps the card-based design that being trend-setter nowadays. If you see the sites like Google+, Pinterest, Medium, and many websites now prefer to use card-based design and it's become so hugely popular. Even in a personal website or blog use this design as well. Perhaps if you also using Blogger, you can see there are a lot of different option of card-based designed for a blog that you can easily implement by clicking it.

The card-based design is a famous way to give simple snippet and provide easy-to-scan posts so that the visitor of your customers is easier to find what they need. You suggest the customers with the cards they currently want. Since every cookie leads to suggestion, they will provide you with good pieces of information (well, sometimes it is bad as well), So this practically the best way to make the customers stay for a while and scan the topics.

Should We Follow?

But is it good to keep the pace with what's trending out there? Do you have to do the same for them? Well, there is always pros and cons to everything. Not every design that even become trend-setter and famous is fit for you and perfect to entice the visitors.

For example, the card-based design is not always fit any platform of the website. If you push it too hard, it will ruin the entire plan and make your website getting worse. Or let's say you have an e-commerce website. Mostly, e-commerce website comes with a lot of information on its homepage. Promotion, coupons, last seen products, menu, search bar, cart, sign-in option, and many more. For the first-timer customer, it will be a huge confusion. But for any loyal customer, they can easily manage to do on their own. They can find what they, need, get some promotion to buy more, and clean up their cart in an event day (Christmas, Black Friday, Valentine, New Year Festival, and more of it) for something they don't even need.

The point is that we don't need to follow the trend. Do not be a follower. Be a trendsetter. Innovate something new, get level up, make good contents to take the first place of the search engine, and build your own identity.

But how you can get the title of the best website design and increase the growth of your traffic. Perhaps these things down below will help. Prepare your note!

How to Make a Good Design

Since we know that there is always trend-setter to be the best website design year after year, we should consider to make everything better than before and take the role as the best website design.

Perhaps this is an old way to make a good design. But actually, this fundamental to make any design. Not just website design, but also everything that needs to be designed by you. I got these questions from Udacity, one of the best platforms I know to learn computing and website kinds of stuff.

Maybe I already wrote about this topic, but it's worth to discuss, so let's hear it.

Goal Question:

What do I want to accomplish?

The Gulf of Execution is about discovery, so when crossing this gulf, users ask:

  • What are my alternatives?
  • What can I do now?
  • How do I do it?


The Gulf of Evaluation is about feedback, so when crossing this gulf, users ask:

  • What happened?
  • What does it mean?
  • Is this OK? Have I accomplished my goal?



Do you understand? Okay, let me explain a bit more.

To make a website, there is always some goal that you want to accomplish. Whether it's personal or organizational goal. And to reach this goal, you need to set alternatives since life will always give you lemons for every step that you make. If you failed, there must be alternatives to accomplish your goal.

As I said before, The Gulf of Evaluation is all about feedback. You need to take feedback from your visitor. Ask politely to your website subscriber. Even apps in Google Play or Apple Store also have this feature to get some feedback from their app users.

The point is that you don't get predicate as the best website design because you are lucky, but you get it because you know everything that you did and doing. And furthermore, it leads you to the best level of competition. Becoming the trend-setter and influencer to other websites.

P.S. In my next article, I will try to make a post about e-commerce web design. Since there will be more e-commerce website out there and you need to survive by taking your website to the next level. See you!