Website Design as a strategy to grow your business

For companies that want to stand out in the market and, especially, in their niche, simply having a website is not enough. It is essential to deliver a well-structured portal with functionality, accessibility, and a pleasant visual design. That is where website design comes into play.
When well executed, it combines aesthetics and technical aspects to create attractive, functional, and user-centered interfaces. When carried out by specialists with precision, design can transform the way visitors interact with a site, boosting interest, engagement, and consequently, conversions.

After all, website design encompasses the entire process of building the visual and functional structure of web pages, from content organization to effective interaction with users. With the advancement of digitization, the increase in mobile access, and the growing demand for personalized experiences, this area has become even more crucial for the success of any business.

Understanding the pillars of website design, from UX and UI to responsiveness and Information Architecture, is the starting point for those who want to attract, delight, convert, and retain their online audience.

Talk to Dexa and discover the potential of Website Design

What You Need to Know About Website Design

Website design goes beyond visuals or current trends: it is about understanding your company’s portal as a strategic platform designed to facilitate the user’s journey toward conversion.

Good design is built on clear principles, such as an efficient visual hierarchy, text scanability, well-structured content organization, and an emphasis on desired actions, like strategically placed buttons or forms. It is also necessary to consider factors such as color contrast for accessibility, page loading speed to avoid drop-offs, and simplicity in navigation to minimize distractions for visitors.

It is equally essential to align all elements with the brand identity and continuously test the experience across different devices and user profiles, adjusting details according to real data and feedback. In short, a well-crafted website is the result of a strategic approach, effective techniques, and ongoing analysis. This ensures that every detail contributes to turning visitors into customers while building true digital authority.

Read also: Stages and impacts of User Experience Design for websites

Pillars and Importance for Digital Businesses

The key pillars of website design include:

• Good first impression: with refined aesthetics and fast loading, the design generates immediate trust.
• Responsiveness and accessibility: ensuring that the site works perfectly on mobile devices and is accessible to all people, regardless of ability.
• SEO and optimization: making sure the website is easily found by search engines.
• Brand consistency: fundamental for reinforcing the company’s visual identity and values.
• Loading speed: crucial to avoid user abandonment.
• Graphic resources: making the website visually appealing and communicative.
• Visual hierarchy: guiding the flow of information and making comprehension easier.
• Content: must be relevant, well-organized, and tailored to the audience’s needs.

Working on these pillars requires a balance between aesthetics, technical execution, and strategy, ensuring the website serves both to captivate and to convert.

Best Practices: Foundations for Consistent Results

Adopting the best practices in website design is essential to building solid pages that convert visits into concrete actions and maintain sustainable growth. More than following aesthetic trends, this means applying principles that have been proven to boost website performance, user satisfaction, and conversion power.

• Clear and targeted objectives:
  Design should quickly guide the visitor to the main desired action (purchase, quote, contact), eliminating distractions and facilitating decisions.
• Visual and brand consistency:
  Using standardized color palettes, fonts, and icons strengthens identity and creates a trustworthy digital environment.
• Efficient visual hierarchy:
  Distributing sizes, spaces, and contrasts ensures the user’s gaze naturally flows between the most important elements.
• Accessibility for all:
  Ensuring inclusive navigation with alternative text for images, suitable contrast, and easy-to-complete forms.
• Optimization for mobile devices:
  Flexible layouts and intuitive interactions guarantee a good experience on every screen, avoiding lost visits.
• Speed and performance:
  Fast-loading websites improve engagement and reduce bounce rates.

The sum of these practices raises any website to a higher level, making it more focused and relevant to the audience and, above all, creating real differentiation from competitors. That’s how design turns into results.

Count on Dexa to turn design into concrete results

UX Design: The Center of User Experience

UX Design is the strategic pursuit of understanding users’ desires, weaknesses, and needs with every access. The work begins with research and deepens with clear navigation flows, eliminating obstacles and making each step intuitive.

Usability is central to this process: an efficient website provides quick learning, reduces the chance of errors, facilitates recovery, and satisfies the user, even during the most complex tasks. The user journey, meanwhile, maps everything from discovery to purchase completion, revealing emotions, doubts, and drop-off points — it’s the UX’s role to craft solutions for these challenges.

Accessibility completes this scenario, with practices that guarantee navigation for everyone, including screen readers and adaptive browsing. Tools like Figma, Hotjar, and Google Analytics enable frequent testing, behavior analysis, and ongoing improvements.

A real-world example: Amazon regularly redesigns its ‘buy with 1 click’ buttons, simplifying the customer’s journey from search to checkout and making it nearly impossible to get lost in the process.

Complement your knowledge: How Experience Design strengthens user bonds

UI Design: The interface that speaks to the user

UI Design translates into visual choices, comfortable reading, and perceived value as soon as someone enters the site: colors, fonts, icons, and microinteractions form the main non-verbal language of the brand. Consistency of these elements throughout every page creates automatic recognition and reinforces trust. Clarity and feedback accelerate user learning: users must always receive visual responses to their actions, such as loading animations or clear alert messages in forms.

Minimalism, avoiding overcrowded buttons or excessive banners, makes the environment friendly and professional. Additionally, familiar visual metaphors, like cart icons for shopping or trash bins for deletion, lower comprehension barriers and make the experience natural.

Spotify is a great example of these principles: while browsing, the interface maintains vibrant colors, clear typography, and tactile feedback, making each command simple and enjoyable, regardless of the device used.

Responsiveness and Mobile First: Essential today and in the future

The rise of smartphones has transformed responsive design into a mandatory premise. It’s not just about "fitting" elements on smaller screens, but rethinking the entire architecture so that buttons, menus, and flows adapt to each device. The mobile-first concept goes beyond, prioritizing design for smartphones before expanding it to other resolutions, ensuring a streamlined hierarchy and frictionless interactions.

This approach, besides expanding the audience, is a ranking factor on Google, improving the site’s organic relevance.

The WIRED website is a reference: it transforms column layouts into a smooth scrolling experience, with images, text, and clear calls to action perfectly adjusted for mobile. This increases the time users stay and boosts conversion rates on mobile devices.

See also: Why Inclusive Design is urgent

Information Architecture: Organizing to facilitate

Information architecture is the skeleton beneath the visual layer. It involves decisions about where each content will be placed, how information will be grouped, labeled, and easily found. Organizing categories, menus, and buttons logically drastically reduces the visitor’s cognitive load, allowing them to see what they need without detours. Standardized and intuitive labels, breadcrumbs indicating the path, and smart search fields complement the experience.

An efficient architecture saves time, minimizes frustration, and increases chances of conversion.

The Alura course portal exemplifies this intelligence: it has a clear hierarchy from the homepage, efficient course categorization by knowledge area, level, and learning paths, organized menus, easily findable FAQ areas, and an intelligent search system that suggests content as the user types. This structure facilitates quick access, promotes a fluid experience, and raises user engagement and conversion.

The Role of Web Development in Building Websites That Convert

Web development transforms ideas and visual projects into real, functional, and scalable websites. It is a complex process that involves coding and deploying the entire structure responsible for ensuring the website works correctly across different browsers and devices while maintaining security, speed, and compatibility.

Developers work both on the front-end, which is the part users see and interact with, using code such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and on the back-end, which includes servers, databases, and application logic to support the site’s functionality. Efficient web development ensures that the pre-planned website design stands out visually and offers a smooth experience without errors or slowdowns, as well as promoting integration with other tools and functionalities essential to the business.

For example, a properly developed e-commerce site will allow dynamic shopping carts, secure payment gateways, and real-time stock updates, highlighting the importance of this field for digital success.

Differences between Website Design and Web Development: The synergy that drives results

Website design and web development are two disciplines that, although focused differently, are absolutely complementary and essential for the digital success of any project. Website design focuses on the visual and interactive experience, creating how the user perceives and navigates the page, defining elements such as layout, color palette, typography, and visual flows that make the interaction pleasant and intuitive.

Web development, on the other hand, is the technical process that transforms this design into functional code, ensuring that all visual and interactive features run efficiently, with absolute security and compatibility across browsers and diverse devices.

The perfect integration between these areas goes beyond the sum of their parts: it guarantees that the website captivates visitors visually while delivering a robust, fast, and reliable experience. Sites that don’t combine design and development suffer classic issues such as slowness, errors, display failures, and vulnerabilities that damage brand image and repel users.

At Dexa, the synergy of design and development is the foundation of our delivery: we unite creative and technical expertise to develop projects that convert more, perform better, and offer memorable digital experiences. This results in websites that impress at first sight but also faithfully accompany users throughout their journey, leading to solid, lasting outcomes for the business.

Website Creation Process: Steps, Paths, and Tools 

The table below details the entire process to build an effective website, indicating best practices and market tools: