18 Types of Web Design: Which Ones Are Right for Your Brand?
For most businesses, launching a website is straightforward, but the challenge lies in choosing the right type of web design. This might be a tough decision, but it’s crucial for your brand’s success.
Different functionality, navigation, and aesthetics approaches can shape a website’s design, each affecting customers’ perceptions and experiences. This is why it’s imperative to choose a design that supports your brand’s image and goals.
Web design affects the perception of your brand for about half of all consumers. Choosing the right type of design early in the web development process ensures that your website will be in the best position for a successful launch, minimizing the need for costly redesigns.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at nineteen different types of website design formats and layouts, along with the pros, cons, and details that should help you decide on the best choices for your business.
What is Web Design?
Web design refers to the aspects of website development that relate to the user experience. It’s the process that determines a website’s look, feel, and navigational structure.
Effective web design can boost your brand’s online visibility by conveying essential information to users, making it easy for them to find what they’re looking for and enjoy a positive experience.
The impact of successful web design can be measured through KPIs like bounce and conversion rates, and UX metrics like task success and feature adoption rates.
What Are the Different Types of Web Design?
Web design is involved in many parts of the web development process. Various types of website design contribute to the final product.
- Consider design in terms of the format that determines how the site will appear to users and the specific layout of pages and page elements that users will encounter as they navigate the site and utilize its features.
The format and layout choices should serve the website’s ultimate purpose and the specific functions that attract visitors. Every design type will have a unique impact on how users discover and interact with your website.
For example, if your goal is to build a strong brand identity, prioritizing a design that delivers an immersive and cohesive experience is key. On the other hand, if your focus is on enhancing SEO, a website with clear content and seamless navigation will yield the best results. Staying updated on the latest web design trends is also crucial to staying ahead of the competition.
Let’s examine the specific examples, elements, advantages, and disadvantages of various options in these two categories.
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The 7 Types of Web Design Formats
The web design format determines the basic principles that will govern the structure and display of your website. Here are the seven main types to consider:
1. Fixed
One of the most fundamental design theories is also an unusual one to encounter in a modern commercial website. Fixed design holds to a specific layout and resolution no matter what browser or screen size the viewer is using.
- Pros: This design offers complete control over the site’s appearance, ensuring uniformity across all devices.
- Cons: Because of their poor performance on mobile devices, fixed designs are generally considered outdated.
2. Static
Static websites are designed to display consistently—but not necessarily optimally—across a variety of devices. The layout and pages are determined ahead of time, and their dimensions stay the same no matter where they’re displayed.
- Pros: Static design is easy to code.
- Cons: The inflexibility of static design makes it a poor fit for highly interactive websites.
3. Dynamic
Dynamic website design leverages sophisticated coding to create interactive, personalized user experiences. While impressive, it requires a database of user information and well-structured segmented content to function effectively.
When redesigning SYNLawn’s website to make it more interactive, we were able to generate positive feedback and improve engagement metrics by replacing the client’s static product images with dynamic media that lets them shine.
- Pros: Customized user experiences tend to be more engaging.
- Cons: Dynamic pages sometimes load slower, and because they’re so resource-intensive, they may require an upgrade to a more robust hosting solution. Your results with this type of design style will depend significantly on your user data and content library’s quality.
4. Liquid
Liquid design shrinks or expands the page elements to fit the browser window, maintaining visual consistency while adjusting to the limitations of the display.
- Pros: Avoids text and images getting cut off by the browser window.
- Cons: If the display shrinks too much, text and other visual details can get hard to see.
5. Adaptive
With adaptive website design, CSS queries determine the user’s browsing environment in real-time and adjust the display according to set parameters. For example, you could set a page’s featured image to always display at 50 pixels less wide than the browser window. These adaptations ensure a more consistent user experience across devices.
- Pros: You can adjust your display to fit any browser or device.
- Cons: Nonstandard software and settings can still lead to suboptimal page displays.
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6. Responsive
One of the most popular design types, responsive design focuses on the core elements of your website and how to automatically size and position them based on the user’s browser settings.
- Pros: Responsive is the best choice for mobile-friendly design. This format ensures that the most important parts of the user experience are consistent regardless of how they’re being accessed.
- Cons: More complex to develop than other design types.
7. Single-Page
The single-page design is exactly what it claims to be. All the information on the website is packed into one single scrollable page.
- Pros: Eliminates many potentially costly and time-consuming development choices.
- Cons: The page functionality is minimal.
11 Popular Types of Website Layouts
Layout follows closely behind the overall design format, and it’s essential to choose a layout that complements the design format. Layout possibilities are endless, but here are a few types of website layouts that have proven to be effective:
1. F-Shape
This widely used layout is intended to follow where our eyes naturally tend to go when we’re scanning new information. By placing key page elements within this pattern, designers can create pages with intuitive, effortless navigation that still manage to convey many details. This is a good layout to use when presenting a lot of different options for the user to choose from.
2. Z-Shape
Another layout that tries to anticipate the user’s natural eye movements, the Z-shape matches the pattern we follow when we’re reading blocks of text in Western languages. This layout can be effective for steering the user toward a particular call to action.
3. Boxes
With this layout, the page elements are set into ‘boxes’ of varying sizes that can be navigated separately. A site might feature a header and navigation controls in one box, with other boxes for product images and descriptions. Artist portfolio sites sometimes use this layout.
4. Split Screen
A split screen layout divides the screen vertically or horizontally into two distinct sections. It is often used for navigation and content display. This layout can also be a creatively appropriate choice for businesses that have two separate but related product lines to feature.
5. Sidebar
This layout places a fixed menu of navigational options on one side of the page, making it easy for users to locate various resources quickly. This works best if you have few menu options. Too many, and a fixed sidebar can start to look cluttered.
Called upon to create a careers site for NewDay USA, Moburst opted for a classic top navigation bar that allowed the maximum page space to focus on the employee-centered content of their recruiting campaign.
6. Gallery
An earlier iteration of the grid layout, Gallery uses scaled-down thumbnail images and descriptive text to help users navigate a variety of options. This is still a popular format for ecommerce sites and media or video libraries.
7. Grid
The grid layout organizes information into modular “blocks” or “cards” that are arranged in a grid format, usually with adjustable display options. You can give a lot of different elements equal space with this flexible layout, making it a popular choice for ecommerce platforms, portfolios, video streaming services, and other sites where visual consistency and organization are crucial.
For the award-winning redesign of Redefine Meat’s website, Moburst used a grid display for the product portfolio on the Technology page, visually signifying the scope of the client’s offerings.
8. Magazine
The magazine format replicates the layout of pre-internet print magazines, combining columns and blocks to create visually engaging arrangements of diverse elements. The magazine layout can mix and match any of the other layouts listed here, and is often used by online publications that have lots of varied content to offer.
9. Asymmetrical
Asymmetrical layouts play with white space, relative size, and visual balance to create unique and engaging website styles. Artistic layouts like this are favored by innovators, creatives, and other site owners who want to stand apart from the crowd.
10. Featured Image
The simple concept behind this layout is to prominently display a featured image on each page. The image generally relates to the content of the page and serves as a focal point and example to the viewer. Single-product ecommerce sites, blogs, and freelancer sites can be a good fit for the featured image layout.
11. Curated Visuals
This layout operates on a similar principle to the featured image layout but opts for a variety of photos and illustrations instead of a single hero image. Curated visuals can help convey complex information and support the correct interpretation of accompanying text, making this an excellent choice for tutorials and other instructional websites.
How to Choose the Right Website Design Format and Layout
Selecting the right design format and layout is about crafting a user experience that seamlessly aligns with your brand and business objectives. Just as a well-tailored suit complements its wearer, the right design choices will enhance your website’s functionality and appeal.
When considering the various types of web design, here are the factors to guide your decision-making:
- Purpose and Functionality – Let your website’s goals be your compass. An ecommerce platform might thrive with a grid layout to showcase products, while a blog could shine with a featured image format to emphasize visual narratives.
- Content Type and Volume – Your content dictates the layout. A magazine-style layout accommodates diverse content beautifully, whereas a single-page design delivers a concise message with impact. Content and its presentation are directly tied to SEO, and will influence your site ranking and the organic traffic it generates.
- Target Audience – Understand your users. If they primarily browse on mobile devices, a responsive design is non-negotiable.
- Brand Identity – Your design should mirror your brand’s personality. A cutting-edge tech company might embrace an asymmetrical layout, while a traditional law firm might find comfort in a classic F-shape layout.
- Technical Considerations – Complex designs can influence development time and costs, page loading time, and accessibility. Balance your vision with practical constraints and an eye towards the user experience.
Carefully weighing these factors will help you choose a design format and layout that looks stunning and functions flawlessly to drive your business forward. Check out our web design case studies to get inspiration about the wealth of possibilities available to you.
Make Design Choices That Serve Your Goals
Web design covers every aspect of how a user perceives, experiences, and interacts with your website. Your design choices shape the brand image you project, and can impact your conversion rate by either supporting or clashing with the actions you want users to take. Before even getting to the style and content choices that make up the outward face of design, it’s essential to choose a format and layout that suit your objectives for the website.
As an all-in-one digital marketing agency with expert web development services, Moburst builds websites that help brands boost their online visibility and become leaders in their categories. Whether you need an asymmetrical responsive design or a single-page Z-shape, our team will work closely with you to bring your website vision into reality.
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