4 Reasons Why You Should Stick to Atomic Web Design Methodology

Web designers and developers now use a wide range of techniques and methodologies to create creative and engaging web pages. Each designer will have their unique styles and preferences, and the requirements of the clients also vary. Some developers prefer to develop a website from the top down, to begin with, the high-end components, and then create their pages down to the last detail. This approach is so common and found to yield quality outputs.

Some other creative designers tend to adopt the bottom-up web design approach. They start with the most minute or atomic elements and then move up step by step to the bigger picture. The approach is simplest to the most complex. This is also known as atomic web design. In this article, we will explore some of the benefits of the atomic design model and why you need it.

1. It's Easy to Mix and Match the Design Components

If you can break down the web-building components into minute atomic particles, it becomes easier to reuse different parts of the sites. It is also possible to mix and match these minute particles are various possible ways to come up with the most creative solutions. Say, for example, take a simple website that contains five basic atoms like

• Small image
• Large image
• Paragraph
• List items, and
• Link.

Using these elements, you can create usable web pages by combining and duplicating these atoms to create molecules and then full objects as explained.

2. Creation of the Style Guide is Made Easier

If you are into a site development with atomic design methodology, the atoms and molecules are created at the first point and serve as the base components of the style guide. Even for the sites which are not built in the atomic design model, it is easy to extrapolate the primary components to put them together in various formats to construct any number of pages. However, if you are into a new site development project, it is always best to create the website atomically from scratch rather than introducing the atomic design method later on.

3. Easy to Learn and Use

The code used in the atomic design is much easier compared to the traditional web development coding approach. This makes things easier not only at the time of web making but also when the site is maintained or modified. With the ease to change or rearrange the atomic elements, small tweaks on the websites from time to time are much easier, which will help give a fresh look to the website always. Another big advantage of the atomic design is that it makes it much simpler to explain the code base to a new developer or website administrator.

4. More Consistency

With predefined atoms used to build the site layout, it is much easier to identify which components comprise each part of the website. This fully eradicates the likelihood of duplication of code. For example, if you have to add a specific button to your website, it is easier for the atomic designer to go back and look for an exact match to instantly duplicate it rather than sitting down and doing custom coding, which is an overhead.

Adding to all these, as atoms are used as the building blocks for website development, it becomes less likely for web developers to create many atoms for a similar purpose, this not only saved in terms of time for web design and development but also a lot of money.