What actually goes into web design? It’s not just pretty pictures, or about creating a flat design anymore. And even the best of us are still learning. Web design that achieves high Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores is not only down to design skill, it’s, crucially, down to lots of other technical skills and experience in many other areas.
Successful Core Web Vitals web design
High CWVs scores depends on structure of design, loading times and usability. All these aspects of great web design reap rewards and get you up the search engine rankings. Not the design alone, but the design combined with HTML and CSS structure, and the scripts used.
The quality of the Content Management System (CMS) counts too. As well as looking at the structure of the designed templates, how quickly they load, how soon they are usable, and whether anything changes position as they load. In addition, it’s necessary to examine how these templates behave on a large screen, a small screen and everything in between.
Remember when web design used to be a flat design?
Website design used to be just a matter of providing a flat design that would be created into a web page as it was. After that it became necessary to provide a mobile and a desktop version of a web page. But that’s been totally thrown out now as website design has become more fluid.
Any designs a CWV web designer creates now need to be layered and compliant with the design elements of Google Webmaster Guidelines, including CWV, W3C and accessibility standards, and be fully responsive-ready. Only then can the designed templates be reviewed for the necessary improvements.
Web design now has to be fluid to work
Nothing in web design is fixed any more. An understanding of grid systems is necessary and at what ‘breakpoints’ content should switch, for example, from 12 boxes across the page to two rows of six, to three rows of four, to four rows of three, to six rows of two, to 12 rows of one.
And if breakpoints are necessary should navigation switch to a horizontal slider at some point? Visitors may want to scroll through the boxes horizontally instead of with left and right arrows and endless scrolling up and down the pages. And if navigation does use a slider, how many should be visible at any one time, and at what breakpoints?
This is just one example of many things that have to be considered in the fluidity of web design.
Even resizing, isn’t just resizing
There’s a lot more to resizing images than just resizing across the whole range of sizes. Breakpoint implications need to be considered.
Even a photo is no longer just a photo. The website presents the browser with a range of different images to choose from. You wouldn’t want to send a large image to a mobile phone to use as a thumbnail, eat up all the user’s data and give them a low loading experience when a much smaller image will do the job.
The menu you have on a larger device may need to work slightly differently on a tablet, and be different altogether on a mobile. And you can’t just get away with hiding images on smaller devices to make more room; this often frustrates users who switch between multiple devices and find features missing on certain versions of your website; in fact, it can even be discriminating.
Consider a user with sight problems who has your website zoomed in on a desktop and half the features are unavailable because it behaves like it does on a mobile phone. This isn’t a professional, or acceptable, standard of web design.
A great web designer is one who keeps on learning
As we say, the best of us are still learning. But what a fantastic journey for making peak-performance online experiences for users, and our CWV scores are testament to that.
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