As the web caters ever better to the visually oriented experiences users want, and as mobile-friendly website design has become a mandatory part of site creation, a style known as website card design has become increasingly popular. It refers to using prominent, simple blocks that resemble cards to organize and display a website’s information and links.
Benefits of Website Card Design
Card design is especially well suited to websites with extensive navigation or information. The cards show visitors a number of options in a visually engaging, easy-to-follow manner. Each one represents one “soundbite” or additional website page. This allows users to quickly scan their options, as opposed to wading through too much top-level navigation, too many annoying drop-down menus, or long lists of text.
Organized, carefully placed blocks also make for a cleaner, simpler, more streamlined layout, which is highly welcoming to visitors. Cluttered, complicated, hard-to-scan, text-heavy pages, on the other hand, tend to send users running.
And it’s fun. There are lots of ways to play with the sizing, colors, layout, and content of cards. Combined with their emphasis on imagery over text, they have a way of creating a more engaging, fun feel on a web page while still being entirely professional.
As a result of all this, card design keeps visitors on a large site longer and gets them to visit more pages. Thus they’re more likely to develop a relationship with the brand and continue along the sales funnel.
This style is also very agreeable to mobile versions of websites. Card design is flexible, scalable, and easy to work with from a web designer’s perspective, ensuring that websites look great and function properly on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile tech.
As an added bonus, cards are convenient for experimenting to improve your on-site results. They can be relocated, reorganized, resized, colored differently, and otherwise tweaked to see what yields more clicks (or taps, since cards are great for touch screens).
Some Website Card Design Best Practices
If you decide to go the card design route, here are some basic tips to ensure you enjoy all the potential benefits.
- Card design is most effective for sites with numerous pages or link destinations or lots of content to highlight
- Take a minimalist design approach to counterbalance having a lot of information
- Each card is only one link, call to action (CTA), piece of information, or image
- Cards themselves can be clickable, but you often benefit from giving users a visual cue in the form of an obvious button—but only one per card
- Images work well in cards, but drastically limit text
- Separate all cards with ample white space to prevent a cluttered appearance
- Make your most important cards the most prominent (through size, color, and placement)
- Bold, thick, simple, sans serif fonts work best in cards
- Ensure adequate contrast between background colors and text for easy readability
Website Card Design from CREATE180 Design
Think a card design might be the right approach for your new website or redesign? We’re well versed in applying the style, as well as monitoring and continually improving its results. If you’ve spent any time on our site, you know we heavily emphasize conveying your brand story and building your site for the 5-second win.
Card design can be a fantastic tool for these purposes. We’d be happy to discuss whether it’s an appropriate way to go for your project, so please get in touch.
