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If you’re a marketer… ’t think about design standards every day. If you’re a web designer… If you’re the visitor… Your visitors are not blank slates. Your website is the millionth site they’ve visited, so they come with strong ideas about what they’ll find and where they’ll find it. So conforming to standards is generally a good way to help meet your visitors’ expectations. What are web design standards? The World Wide Web Consortium publishes a set of standards, but these are mostly technical web standards (HTML, CSS, file formats and JavaScript), privacy standards and accessibility standards. They are not focused on the actual design of websites. But if you’re a designer, standards are about website features and designs, not code or content. Web design standards are norms and models for web page layouts and UX features, used by marketers and web designers in comparative evaluations. They are guidelines for usability.
What web design features are standard? What elements should be included? What elements should be avoided? This little research project answers those questions. Which features are standard on websites? To answer this question, we created a checklist of 14 web design elements, then looked at 500 marketing websites to see just how standard these standards really are. Note: The dataset was mostly B2B marketing websites from five major industries: finance, tech, manufacturing, food and construction. Websites were reviewed in desktop view with a focus on homepages. We learned that there are surprisingly few standards, but quite a few web design conventions. Conforming to standards is usually a good thing. We all visit a lot of websites, so we have a lot of expectations. When something works the way we expect, we’re happy. When something doesn’t work the way we expect, we feel friction and frustration. So conforming to norms is generally a good way to meet visitors’ expectations for usability.
But standards can let us down. We shouldn’t do something just because a lot of other people do it. Often the popular features don’t even align with best practices. Many of the most common features consistently test poorly in usability studies. Let’s look at the features in context on a page. This chart shows both their popularity and our input on how well these align with lead generation website best practices. The data comes from our review of 500 websites. So clearly, web design standards and web design best practices are not the same. This becomes even more evident when you see just how common it is for websites to miss simple opportunities to add clarity. Are websites communicating quickly and clearly? The first job of every webpage is to tell visitors that they’re in the right place. This can be done simply by being specific and descriptive in several places: titles, headers, navigation labels, calls to action and evidence. The majority of websites fail to be descriptive in at least one of these elements, even though each of these elements could be addressed in minutes at no cost in any content management system.
This may be simpler to review in context. If we show each of these in a sample layout, you can clearly see just how prominent these elements are in user experience. If your website doesn’t tell visitors what you do in these visually prominent areas, your visitor is likely to be confused or even frustrated, especially when it’s their landing page. 93% of websites have a logo in the top left corner. Where else would it go? This is really one of only two web design standards. Center aligned is the alternative, which can work well, but you need to plan the navigation around it carefully. Don’t make it too big. Don’t use the version with the tagline locked in. That’s illegible, especially on mobile. Don’t forget to compress the image to reduce page speed. It’s one of the first things to load. 13% of websites have social media icons in the header.
That number is half of what it was five years ago. The top of every page is definitely the most prominent place to promote your social media presence. Social icons in the header are especially common on B2C websites and niche publisher websites, where brand awareness and pageviews are life and death. But on a B2B lead generation website, it’s a weird idea. These are candy-colored exit signs. Traffic is hard to win and easy to lose. If the visitor clicks one of those icons, they’ll land on a site that does everything possible to keep that visitor. They’ll be distracted. They’ll forget about you. That’s why this is on our list of things to remove from your website immediately. Recommendation: Remove the social icons from your header. Put them at the very bottom of the visual hierarchy, down in the footer. 53% of websites have a search tool in the header. Site search is a very common feature, but it’s not necessarily helpful to visitors.
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