Does your website look professional? Or does it look like a bad DIY project?
The look of your website makes an impression on your potential customers that navigate to your site. When your website looks homemade and is difficult to navigate, it can drive website visitors away and on to your competitor.
Websites need to display a balanced design to your viewers. Images must be clear and well placed on the page. Text must be aligned properly.
And menus and other elements on your website must work together to present a holistic, professional look that is inviting, attractive and functional.
Developers use certain methods to make websites look good. Here’s how to make a website look professional.
Follow these tips to make your website look professional.
Using responsive design for your website is one of the first steps in making a professional looking website.
Responsive design refers to the template you choose for your website. Whether you’re hiring a web designer or using a WordPress website template, you must choose a theme with a built-in response design.
So what does responsive design mean?
Responsive design will make your website look professional on any device.
This means whether your prospect is viewing your website from a desktop computer at their office, on a tablet or laptop while relaxing, or on their mobile phone on the go, it will look good.
On the other hand, if a website is not built using a responsive design template, images will be cut off, text can end up squished together or off the pages and your website will look unattractive. It will also lack functionality.
When designing a website, the colors you choose are important. The color scheme should blend well together, meaning the colors look good on the page. You can choose your colors by viewing a color palette.
Each color has a numerical value that you or your web developer will input into the color development area.
For a soft look, choose colors that are closer together on a color wheel or from a color palette. But if you want to create contrast, select colors that are directly opposite one another.
Avoid using more than three colors as a theme for your website. Choose two or three.
When selecting colors, think of your target audience. For example, if you have a financial company, stick to conservative colors such as blue and white. If you sell products to millennials, you can get more fun with brighter hues.
If you have the budget, you can hire a professional website designer or web developer to design your website.
Having the budget to create a custom-designed website enables you to do more with your company website. It gives you more freedom in layout, design, image placement and the number of pages on your website.
Building a custom-designed website will also allow you to customize other elements such as custom videos, animations, sound files and a whole lot more. In a nutshell, you’ll have more control over your site’s functionality.
With a custom designed website, scalability is better. Your web professional will be able to make changes to your website as your business grows without having to create a brand new website and finding a new template.
On the other hand, custom designed websites eat up your company’s resources and drain your bottom line.
If you’re a small business without a big budget, and you have some basic technical knowledge and some time, you might prefer building your website on your own.
These days there are a wide array of website templates and do-it-yourself web tools that make even the most novice web builder able to design a professional-looking website. Find out more about them.
These website tools offer a variety of responsive design templates, an array of color themes and layout options that are budget-friendly.
The good thing about doing your website on your own is that you can make changes to your site yourself.
Unlike a custom-designed website may be created in HTML or HTML5. This business owner will need to wait for a professional that knows HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to update or make the changes to the website.
With a DIY template, that’s not an issue. And to add, you can hire a professional for other services for your business such as SEO or social media marketing and promotion which will help you grow your business.
When it comes to professional website design, you shouldn’t overlook your site navigation.
Navigation refers to your menus. Your menus don’t only have to look good and enable your text to be legible. Your menus have to get your prospects to where they want to go.
When your navigation system is organized and make sense, your visitors can find your product pages.
When they can’t find the pages and products or services they are looking for, they get frustrated and leave.
When thinking about a good looking website, content might not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, the words on your website can either impress or turn off your website visitors.
Content with engaging headlines makes you look even more professional than mediocre headlines and copy. If your words engage your website visitors it will enable you to connect with them in a professional way.
On the other hand, when your website displays poor grammar and run-on sentences, people make judgments about the professionalism level of your business.
An experienced content writer can make your words sing and motivate your prospects to subscribe to your email list to receive your newsletters and product information.
Now you know how to make a website look professional. A well designed and well-written website will impress your visitors.
Incorporate the ideas from this post into your website design strategy for a professional and functional company website.
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