If your motto in design reads “less is more”, website design Phoenix brings you 5 essential rules that you must live by.

Keep reading to find out how to create a clean, simple, minimalist site design.

Focus on the Content

If you have a beautiful design but no enticing copy writing, no call-to-action and no relevant content, your website isn’t going to get many results. The main focus of your design should be to communicate content effectively.

Your display of information should be simple, but not over simplified or under designed. You will always have multiple simple and clean options as to how you can display your content, in such cases focus on the method that would put more focus on the content.

Use a Grid

You should always design around grid to aid the viewer in navigating through your site. An underlying grid, whether it ends up being very apparent or not in the live design, will ensure all design elements align properly and will also aid in establishing hierarchy.

Usability

If your website isn’t functional, it’s pointless and taking up unnecessary digital space. Keep in mind that function is always more important than form. This does not mean that you should not be creative with styles and design treatments, but be conscious of how the user will interact with the site.

Your website should be intuitive for the user to navigate. Your minimalist design does not have to be tiny, illegible text in a black and white design template as it is often stereotyped. Also, ensure that your users can easily tell what elements are links and are able to navigate back to previous pages.

Whitespace

Being a minimalist designer, you will often have clients ask you to get rid of the empty space or complain about there being too much white space. Here, you need to communicate to your clients that every design element needs room to breathe and just because there is room to add something, doesn’t mean you should.

Whitespace works because it helps define content areas and ensures elements don’t become jumbled together. It also prevents the page from being cluttered as a result of adding too many design elements on a single page, rendering it ineffective.

Refine

As a minimalist designer, refining is your best friend. Work through multiple iterations of your design refining and taking away any unnecessary elements that don’t add to the design. If you find that something isn’t adding value to the design, remove it.

Constantly ask yourself through every step whether or not you really need each element you’ve included or are thinking about adding. After the site is launched, you can use analytics to see which design elements are infrequently clicked and evaluate removing them or moving them to a new location.

In conclusion, it is important to remember that elements omitted from your design are just as important as what is kept.