A few years back, people were focusing on having a professional looking website and SEO. We showcased everything and mentioned every page and category on the homepage. We told everything, a result that saw us end up with cluttered designs. However, blog designs have evolved. The focus is not only on professionalism but also user-friendliness of your visitors, thus the need for minimalist web design
The taste and preferences for website designers and website owners have evolved over time and is likely to change with time. For instance, some bloggers have decided to do away with the sidebar widget completely and have content centered on their web pages. This gives readers a destruction-free experience but limits some important showcasing.
What is Minimalist Website Design?
This is a phrase that is used to refer to the effort channeled towards simplifying a website’s look, feel and user-friendliness. That’s having only those things that help you achieve your aim as a blogger or an online entrepreneur.
Minimalist blog design does one thing really well: reducing the design to only the most essential elements necessary for a design to function. A super minimalist web design means that, at this point of the design, there is no element which can still be reduced without hindering the websites core and often, the only aim.
Simply put, it’s a process of de-cluttering your website so as to increase user-friendliness.
This could involve removing unnecessary tabs, menus or any other form of content that doesn’t help to further the facilitation and solution of the user’s needs and goals. Your users (customers) come first; if you let them come second, you are out of business.
Does your blog make it easy for them to find what they need? If not, then chances are you are a little bit selfish… with annoying adverts, hundreds of widgets on your sidebar, dozens of items on your navigation menu and so forth.
To achieve minimalist design, it’s time to strip away as much clutter as much as possible:
- No non-user triggered pop-up videos
- No annoying auto play on-landing music
- No drop-down navigation menu unless on mobile
If you visit our website, www.thepennymatters.com, for example, you will note that we have everything organized and well thought-out layout. However, we haven’t achieved minimalism web design yet, and we are working on it.
What we aim to achieve with minimalist web design…
To ensure that readers:
- can concentrate more on what they came looking for, (and that means a whole world to me, as my sole aim is to make an impact wherever I go,)
- fall in love with what we write about,
- read another related post,
- and be convinced to subscribe or even,
- enroll in a premium courses or buy a premium eBook.
What do you want your blog to achieve? Perhaps, yours is something similar to ours!
We achieve these through minimalist web designing.
Reasons Why You Want to adopt minimalist design approach to your website
- Easy navigation.
- With the minimalist approach, you are able to make things easier for your readers. Trust you me, they are busybodies, don’t force them to figure things out on their own. Because they won’t and they will before you even get a chance to show your awesomeness.
- Faster loading.
- A complicated website with much codes, scripts, and other applications are usually slow loading. This turn people off. With minimalism web design, you can easily have your entire website load in under 3 seconds (recommended)
- SEO-friendly.Classically simple websites are easier for search engine bots (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to crawl.
- Fewer technical hitches. A less complicated site with fewer applications, plugins, and elements are less likely to break.
Elements (Principles) of Minimalism Website Design
To achieve a classically simple website layout, take keynote of the following elements and web design principles
#1: Less is More.
This is a principle that applies to minimalism in general. As a content creator, your sole purpose when it comes to web design is to ensure that your blog design contain the barest of elements that enable you to serve your readers and customers. If you have a sidebar, only place three or four most important widgets such as subscription box and a Call to action to your premium products and/or your most popular posts
#2: Negative Space/White Space
This is also referred to as the whitespace. It’s the empty space between elements on your website. Our emails make use of whitespace a lot, that’s why you can easily scan through and find what you really want to read.
Also, use a considerable paragraph spacing to ensure easy reading. This way, the eye is drawn towards the little content that remains on the page.
(now, the above empty space is what we refer to as the whitespace or negative space)
#3: Visual Designs
Make use of suitable and visually compelling images to convey a particular message and avoid thousands of words, a photo is a worth a thousand…?
#4: Design consistency
Your minimalist design won’t do you justice if it’s not consistent. You want to ensure that your basic customizations such as colours and fonts types and sizes are considered at a websites’ theme’s level rather than at page levels, especially if you are using page builders such as Divi, Elementor and Thrive Architect to build your pages
To achieve consistency, consider the following elements of blog design:
- Typography: Remember words are powerful artistic elements and you want to ensure a balance between words and images.
- Contrast: You would want to have some black, white, and gray colors along with a bold brand color of your choice.
Other Web Design Trends in for User Engagement
Minimalism is one of the web design trends that many designers and bloggers really care about. However, there are several other design trends that will enhance your users engagement.
Website speed.
3 seconds. That’s all you’ve got to stop a wandering visitor, say hi, introduce yourself and hook them into reading you post or hanging around and checking you out. If you let your low speed consume these seconds, then your blog doesn’t have a future in the content world. Optimize your website for speed. Use a good web hosting company such as Bluehost and remove the number of queries that your website ask every time a when rendering a page
Mobile-first
More than half of your readers are visiting your website form their mobile phones. Optimize your website for small devices. Before launching your website, test it across different devices and adjust your design accordingly. Google is also favoring mobile-first trend so this will give you a competitive edge if your competitors are not doing it right.
Personalized illustrations.
Beautiful designs are made with beautiful illustrations. These work well for SaaS companies. Finding a competent designer is vital for your thriving online business. You can outsource this service from Fiverr at affordable rate. Fiverr Pro has a pool of premium and highly competent designers who will help you achieve the best of designs
Video backgrounds
This is becoming a popular design element as it humanizes the behind the screens business. Showcase your team at work while handling the things that your customers will be looking for. While pictures are worth a thousand words, a video is a thousand pictures. They tell a story, a powerful one that can make your company.
9 Best Minimalist Website Design Examples to Emulate
- Jon Morrow’s Unstoppable
- Copyblogger
- Jonathan Snook
- Enchanting Marketing
- Medium Blog
- Biko Zulu
- North Kingdom
- Seth’s Blog
Quick Tips to Achieve Minimalist Blog Design.
Does your blog use minimalism approach? If not, it’s time to de-clutter. Follow everything discussed in today’s module and make changes accordingly on your blog.
- Rearrange your navigation menu
- Remove unnecessary widgets on your sidebar
- Choose a simple and classic WordPress theme
- Remove auto play music on landing, if any
- Only use one popup newsletter subscription or none at all
- remove pop-up videos
- If you have ads, reduce their appearance, e.g., limit to one advert per blog post or use Native ads such as Media.Net
- Outsource great images for your videos (We have a growing list of great places to find free stock photos)
