Home » The Advantages and Disadvantages of Minimalist Web Design

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Minimalist Web Design

minimalist webdesign

Designing websites is no easy job. You have a lot to consider and there is a lot of coding that goes underway. You have to take note of the visual aesthetics as well as the technical ones. There is no complete guide that captures the real essence of what goes into web design and one can truly marvel at the ingenuity that goes into the art of making websites. And just rightly so, if they want their content to have the appropriate platform and backdrop it deserves, they should create a design for a website that is befitting for what they want it to represent. Moreover, it is much more likely that potential consumers and customers would be more receptive to a website that is both pleasing to the eyes as well as easy to navigate. Additionally, it would also help first time viewers and lurkers stay on your website longer.

Let’s face it, we all want our websites to be as functional as they should be. A web design that is not clunky, visually aesthetic, information rich, compelling and rather easy to get around with, this is what every end user would want to experience. After all, the ordinary person is almost always in a rush and he or she would not waste time trying to figure out your website and your content for that matter and thus would end up in him or her leaving. This you absolutely do not want.

However with so many existing designs, templates and interfaces, end users almost always have their eyes attack with a barrage and deluge of just too much. And when this happens, more often than not, the end user would exit leaving your website.

This is precisely why there has been a rising number of web designers utilizing the minimalist technique or design. It’s much less to take in yet it offers you the very same visual appeal as other websites do. This design is particularly dominant in the area of online business and service professional websites. But unlike many design fads, minimalist design has more than just your few standard benefits that make it practical and ideal not just for short term but also for long range website appearance and decoration. Furthermore, minimalism can appropriately applied anytime and anywhere and is almost always a good practice to follow. So long as your website maintains that degree of ease of usability, intuitive functionality, there should never be a problem with keeping its look and function as clutter free as possible.  So if perhaps now, this article has you sold over the idea of the minimalist design, your next possible queries might potentially be, what are the advantages and disadvantages if any?

Well, let’s begin with the disadvantages first. There may only be a few especially if you are working on a well thought of and executed plan for minimalism but to name one disadvantages is that what could happen should you try to exaggerate the simplicity and the minimalism in your website down to a level of extreme sparseness where your website not only looks unfinished, but empty, cheap or have nothing much to say.  This may be avoided however even on the most minimalist websites through the use of stylish touches and a good dose of rich content.  Another possible disadvantage of minimalist designs is the potential for them to be insufficient for your needs when your site grows. Your needs may be vastly different they were back then than to how it is now. However, this can easily be avoided if you planned ahead when you started your design. Simple sites are not exactly inflexible and you can avoid the problem of insufficiency in site functionality by building elegant minimalism over a heavy duty website framework which can be scaled up as you progress.

The advantages of having a minimalist web design are so many that they easily outnumber the disadvantages. For starters, a minimalist website is much easier to keep problem free as it is less complex, it loads faster as it has fewer elements and applications. It seems that it would hardly go out of style with its look (for utilizing simple designs tend to be fad free)

In addition to this, the site design itself tends to create an environment that lets your readers focus on what you are offering, perhaps guiding your readers very effectively right in the direction where you want their attention to fall. As a result, you have higher reader retention, sales conversion and they also have a better memory of what they saw when they visited your page. It also gives your website a more professional look. Apart from that, by creating your website with bare essentials in mind, you will open up a large amount of space which could be dedicated to something really important: your content.

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