How to Make Your New Website Look Professional


Image Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/simple-workspace-at-home-6476584/

With the wealth of website construction tools available today, more and more new website owners are building their own rather than hiring a designer. That’s a great way to save money, but it also requires care to ensure that you wind up with a professional-looking site.

Here are 8 tips to consider if you want to DIY and still put your best online foot forward.

1. Keep the Audience in Mind

It’s easy to be seduced by all the amazing things you can do in website design. There are bells and whistles that are fun and clever, and they make you want to just lean back and admire them.

Before you incorporate the latest widget, ask yourself: does my audience really care about this? If a feature is distracting, complicates the website or has the potential to confuse your visitor, leave it out.

Eye-catching content can be good, and you need at least some. However, a visitor to your site wants to understand what your product or service does and how they go about getting it.

You become intimately familiar, even too familiar, with your site. To counter this, take some time away from the screen, then come back and imagine you’re looking at it for the first time.

2. Make Navigation Obvious

If visitors can’t easily find their way around your website, they’ll leave and they won’t come back. If should be obvious from the home page what places users can visit and how they can get there. On every page, it should be clear how you back up the hierarchy and how you jump to another part of the site.

It’s critical to lay out your hierarchy of pages early in the process. Sketch it out. Use pencil and paper or a drawing tool. This representation is sometimes called a wireframe, and there are website design tools that support this.

You should begin your outline early in the process and build it up as you go. At first it will consist of a hierarchy of pages with just a few words about what’s on each. It should also indicate where a user can jump from one branch of the hierarchy to another.

Next you will expand each page with an approximation of its text and pictures and their layout on the screen. This will tell you whether the page contains too little or too much and whether you need to add or combine pages. At this point you can start building individual pages with confidence that they will work well together.

3. Select Images Wisely

Whether you provide your own photographs or use stock images, a judicious selection of pictures makes your site look not only professional but also friendly and trustworthy. A few suggestions:

  • If you use stock images, select from just one source. If you hire photography, use only one photographer. It promotes consistency of style.
  • Use images that relate to your business or tell your story. Skip those that look sharp but don’t say anything about you.
  • Choose images with people who look like your target audience. Use some variety to cover all types of people who will be interested in your website.
  • Prioritize quality over quantity. Displaying a lot of mediocre images drags them all down.
  • Avoid “stagy” and cliched images such as groups grinning at the camera or people high-fiving. Stick to scenes you might see in real life.
  • Crop images for effect. For example, focus on people and leave out the background.

4. Design a Website Logo

A logo solidifies your identity. A good logo sticks in the customer’s mind as an image of who you are and what you offer. Once you have a suitable logo, you can reinforce your image by also using it on business cards, social media, email and any kind of advertising you might do.

If you’re a DIY website developer, you probably don’t want to hire a logo designer. Fortunately, there are apps for logo design that are affordable, easy to use and capable of cranking out a logo in just minutes.

There are logo creators designed for a desktop monitor, but it’s better to choose one of the apps that are geared to smaller devices. When you use a mobile app to design a logo, you get to see, during the process, how it looks on a small screen. After all, today’s surfers are likely to be looking at a phone when they see your logo for the first time.

5. Limit Your Color Palette

This goes hand in hand with keeping your audience in mind. When you’re selecting your colors, it’s easy for the bright and aggressive ones to stand out. It’s also easy to choose too many colors. For most of your potential customers, an array of colors is off-putting. It looks like you can’t make up your mind with the design, during your web development process.

Home interior design has what’s called the 60-30-10 rule, and it’s not a bad idea for website design as well. It says that 60 percent of your space should be in a primary color, 30 percent in a secondary color and 10 percent in an accent color.

The primary color should be a neutral or any color that’s not aggressive. It must be one that you’re comfortable looking at and that’s not distracting when you read. The secondary color can be more assertive, and the accent color can “pop.” If your business has a brand color, the accent is a good place to use it.

6. Use White Space

Interior home design also abhors clutter and encourages openness. In web design, that translates to white space. It doesn’t have to be literally white; an off-white or a light neutral will do. Another name for the concept is “negative space.”

White space breaks up the page. It makes the images and text draw more attention. It’s more inviting. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for and to understand what the page is about when there a limited number of elements on a page and they’re set apart by negative space.

7. Stick To Simple, Legible Fonts

Fancy lettering is fun to look at for a minute or two, but it’s a headache to read for any length of time. It distracts from what you have to say. If visitors get bogged down in the middle of a paragraph, they’ll quit reading.

Your goal is to deliver information, not to awe your audience with how slick the lettering looks. Also, don’t throw an assortment of fonts at your viewers. The right number of fonts for a website is about two, where each serves a slightly different purpose.

On a similar note, be wary of italics and bolding. They’re fine for making individual words and phrases stand out. However, large sections of italics are annoying to read, and excessive bolding within a text segment feels like you’re getting in the user’s face.

8. Prioritize Mobile

People today do more and more of their shopping on their phones, and the trend is only going to grow. It’s not enough for your website to be merely accessible on any device. It has to be friendly, readable and intuitive on a smartphone. You may still spend hours on your laptop, but a lot of folks never use anything larger than a tablet.

You must make sure that text is readable, that images look right and that buttons are visible and accessible. If customers can’t see your “Buy Now” button, they may not bother to look for it.

Fortunately, many of today’s website design tools also prioritize mobile. Don’t consider a page complete until it looks right on a mobile device. With the contemporary audience, a professional appearance is even more important on a phone than on a monitor.