What Great web design is

You Only Notice It When It's Broken

When did you last leave a website thinking "wow, that was a pleasure to navigate"? Probably never. But I'd bet you can immediately recall one that made you squint, pinch-zoom, or give up and Google someone else.

That's the strange paradox of good web design: you genuinely cannot tell it's there. It just works — quietly, invisibly, without asking for applause. Bad design has terrible manners and makes its presence known immediately.

So what does "working well" actually involve? Let's get into it.

Web Design Simplicity: Less Is More - and Not in a Pretentious Way

There's a temptation to put everything on the website. Every service, every qualification, every glowing thing a client ever said. It comes from a good place — you're proud of what you do.

The problem is that a page trying to say ten things says nothing. Visitors don't read websites like books — they scan, glance, and make a snap judgement about whether to keep going. Too much competing for attention and the brain quietly checks out. Not dramatically. Just... gone.

Every element on a page should earn its place. If it isn't helping the visitor, it's in their way.

Website Navigation: Can They Actually Find the Thing?

Navigation sounds dull. It is, in fact, one of the most important decisions in the entire website. If someone can't find what they're looking for within a click or two, they're gone — and they probably won't come back.

A good rule of thumb: aim for no more than five or six clearly labelled top-level menu items. Beyond that, you're asking visitors to scan too many choices at once - and the brain, faced with too many options, tends to pick none. Everything else - legal pages, secondary links, social media — belongs in the footer, where people know to look for it without it cluttering the main navigation.

The catch is that most navigation makes perfect sense to the person who built the site, and moderate-to-zero sense to a stranger arriving cold. "My Offerings" or "The Studio" might feel intuitive to you. Your visitor, who has never heard of you before this moment, might find those labels charming, baffling, or somewhere in between.

The most useful fix is also the simplest: find someone who has never seen your site and ask them to find something specific. Then watch, silently. Every hesitation is free, genuinely useful research.

Visual Consistency: The Design Equivalent of a Firm Handshake

Imagine someone showed up to a coffee meeting and changed outfits between the starter, the main and the dessert. Websites that behave inconsistently create exactly that feeling — just more subtly.

Consistency means the same fonts, colours applied with logic, the same button style, photography that feels like it belongs together. It means the homepage and the contact page feel like part of the same place, not two sites that ended up sharing a domain.

When it's working, visitors don't notice it — they just feel a quiet sense that the site is solid and trustworthy. When it's not, something feels off in a way they probably can't name. Usually it's consistency doing the damage.

Mobile UX: Where MANY Websites Are Quietly Failing

More than half of all web browsing happens on phones. Which means if your website looks great on desktop and becomes a cramped, accidental-tap nightmare on mobile, you're offering a poor experience to the majority of your visitors. Not a few of them. Most of them.

Mobile isn't about squeezing your desktop layout smaller. Text needs to be readable without zooming. Buttons need to be tappable without surgical precision. Forms need to be short — every extra field is a small but real reason not to finish it. Squarespace handles the basics reasonably well, but reasonable isn't the same as optimised.

Web Accessibility: The Part Nobody Talks About Enough

Accessibility gets deprioritised because it's invisible to people who don't need it. If you have full sight and motor control, an inaccessible website just looks like any other website to you — which makes it easy to overlook, and genuinely unfair to the people it excludes.

In practice it's not complicated: enough contrast between text and background, descriptive alt text on images, a logical heading structure, a site that can be navigated without a mouse. And here's what I find genuinely satisfying about it — almost every accessibility improvement makes the site better for everyone. High contrast is easier to read in sunlight. Clear structure helps Google understand the page just as it helps a screen reader navigate it. Doing the right thing and the smart thing turn out to be exactly the same thing.

Website Copy: The Words Are Doing More Work Than You Think

Copy is where websites most often fall apart quietly - partly because it's usually the last thing to get attention, and partly because everyone assumes that since they can write, they can write a website. These are not the same skill.

Good website copy makes a specific person feel, quickly and without much effort, that they're in exactly the right place. That requires knowing who that person is, what language they use to describe their own situation, and what would make them feel confident enough to take a next step.

It also shapes how the design feels. Short, well-spaced paragraphs breathe. Dense, unbroken blocks of text suffocate - regardless of how good the visuals around them are. Copy and design aren't two separate jobs. They shape each other, and they work best when they're developed together.

What a Website That Just Works Actually Feels Like

You land, you understand immediately what's on offer, you find what you need without thinking about it, and you decide whether to take the next step - all without once being aware of the thousand small decisions that made that possible.

Nobody notices the navigation when it works. Nobody appreciates the consistent spacing. Nobody thinks about the mobile optimisation as they tap through on their phone.

But you'll notice when the enquiries start arriving from people who already feel like they know you - who came as strangers and somewhere between the homepage and the contact form decided: yes, this is the one. That's what a website doing its job invisibly actually looks like from your side of the screen.

──────

Vivian Jones is a Squarespace web designer specialising in strategic, conversion-focused websites for service-based businesses. If your website isn't working as hard as it should be, get in touch.