Everyone wants their website to load as fast as possible; it’s just common sense, as well as being an increasing asset for SEO. Many site owners automatically think that this is a technical issue, but design can play a substantial part too. ‘Clean web design’ is more than just an aesthetic trend; it can help sites display their ‘steady state’ in a fraction of the time required by complex layouts.
Clean web design is not the same as minimalism; rather than just keeping information and content to a minimum, it aims to streamline the content. Focus on the message and get to the point, but use design to help do that.
This may involve smarter use of fonts, colour schemes and positioning of elements. Eliminate clutter, but use that change to introduce more white space. And we need to think about how we can streamline the navigation. Does every page really require a link to all the background content on the site?
I’ve always been a big fan of gradual improvement, but the results of ‘cleaning up’ our own website over the years have given us a degree of simplicity that I’d never have expected. I can’t see any downside to this.