When creating your own website, there are many reasons to do it yourself, from complete website control, design personalization, cost-saving, and so on. Recent Statista data suggests that there are 1.88 billion websites today, and the number is fast increasing. As a result, you want to employ the best practices to attract and keep your current and potential website users. If you are looking to cut through the competition and build a successful website, here are some tips to help you make your website look professional.
Use the right color palette
It can be tempting to use eye-catching and bright colors when creating your website design to create your pages. Yet, this can make looking at your website an overwhelming experience. Professional website designers understand the role colors play and their effects on your customers and brand. It is advisable to limit your color palette to maximize your impression. Your website can easily project a sense of chaos and disorganization when you have too many colors. While the best approach is to select one dominant color, accent color, and go with the neutrals, there are a few online tools that can help you quickly generate your website color schemes.
Offer convenient experience
A professional website offers an improved user experience. For this reason, it is best to utilize your white spaces, optimize your page speed, keep consistent website pages, and place an attractive call to action section. Also, make your website more responsive and mobile-friendly. A study showed that the white space around your text and titles could increase user attention by 20%. To keep a consistent website, you want to find a good balance between your website elements such as heading size, fonts, spacing, photo choices, and so on. For an e-commerce website, it can be useful to consider integrating online payment processing features for a convenient checkout experience.
And another way to make sure that the experience really is convenient is to think about offering some good customer service on the site too. The best way is to take a leaf out of the ecommerce book and have some live chat options on there. For this, you’ll want to look into some of the best live chat software for ecommerce merchants that you might want to opt for, and then ensure that you are going to make that as good as possible.
If you have done all that, it’s going to be a much more convenient experience on the whole.
Add high-quality photos
Photos can significantly improve your website content. However, it wouldn’t do your website any good if you stuff it with many stock photos. Although using stock photos may seem easier, it is smart to prioritize quality over quantity. More so, using personal images can make your website look more genuine and build user trust. This doesn’t mean filling your website with grainy selfies and poor camera angles. Low-quality photographs can negatively affect your website user’s perception. It would also be best to pay more attention to features such as lighting and framing when taking your photos.
Keep navigations short
When it comes to your website plan, make sure your website’s menu does not contain too many options. A navigation bar that spans two lines or has many sub-menus can be confusing and difficult to navigate. Keep your top navigation menu between 5 and 7 pages to make your website appear more streamlined. This way, it can be easier for your website user to easily find what they are looking for. Meanwhile, fewer items on navigation can benefit your SEO since more concise navigation sends more authority through your interior pages and increases their likelihood to rank.