Web design is not decoration. It is the work that decides whether a visitor understands in three seconds where they have landed and finds the next step. Everything else — colour, typeface, animation — is subordinate to that.
Pretty and good are not the same. A pretty layout pleases you. A good layout takes the visitor where you want them to go.
1. The first screen says what this is
Open the design and cover the header and the logo. If it is then unclear what the company does and for whom, the layout is not finished, however good it looks.
The commonest mistake is a large atmospheric image with a generic line. „Let's build the future together” may be true but says nothing. What the visitor wants to know is whether you do the thing they are looking for.
2. One decision per screen
If the first screen has five buttons, it has none. Good design offers one primary action per section and turns the rest down. Not to restrict the visitor, but because choosing is tiring, and a tired visitor leaves.
3. Look at it on a phone first
Most visitors arrive on a phone, yet most designs are made and approved on a desktop screen. Turn it around: make the mobile version the one you sign off, and treat the desktop as the extension.
What to check specifically on a phone: is the text readable without zooming, is the main button reachable with a thumb, and does anything at the bottom of the screen cover the content.
4. The copy is not „we'll fill that in later”
If the design carries lorem ipsum, you do not know what it will look like. Real copy is always longer than filler, and half of a good layout is about the real sentences fitting into it.
This is also the commonest cause of delay: it is not the engineering that takes long, it is the copy taking three months. If you order a design, order the copy with it.
5. Speed is design too
A heavy page stuffed with animation is not elegant on a phone with a weak signal — it is blank. Part of design is deciding what price we pay for the look: how many fonts, how large the images, how much motion.
It is a good sign when the designer can tell you what they left out and why. It is a bad sign when something happens in every section.
What not to look at when deciding
Do not judge by whether you like the colour. It does not have to please you but the person who will buy, and the two rarely share a taste.
Do not compare it to your competitor. You do not know whether their site works; they may just have copied someone else's too.
And do not put it to a team vote. The same thing happens as with a logo: everyone trims something off, and what remains is a design nobody likes but nobody objected to.
Template or bespoke?
A template is right when your content happens to be the shape the template was designed for. That is rarer than you think: most businesses hit the wall in month three, when there is no room for what they want to add.
A bespoke design costs more at the start but fits the structure to your content and carries no code you will never use. The choice is not a matter of principle but of how conventional the thing you have to say is.
A layout is finished when a stranger can say in three seconds what you do and find in ten how to reach you. Everything else is taste.
Where to next
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