4 Tips On Website Design

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Updated 8 years ago

I remember when I built my first website many years ago, what a great feeling that was! Just to actually have something online was terrific. At the time, I didn't even really care how it looked – I was just happy to have something live on the internet.

I imagine they're many WA members experiencing the same enthusiasm.

Now, it's all well and good if you're just throwing up a blog for yourself but when you expect to make money from it, that's another story.

I've seen a lot of WA websites that probably won't convince a visitor to buy from them and it's not necessarily for lack of good content, it's because their websites look super amateurish.

To be clear, content is and will always be the most important part of your website. But design DOES play a crucial role too. For instance, an amateurish-looking website with incredible content is likely to have a higher bounce rate than one with quality content AND good design.

So I thought I'd try to help by pointing out some of the most common problems I see. By no means is this list complete. It’s just a few examples that immediately came to mind.

Color Palette

It’s important to have a well thought out color scheme for your website instead of throwing together some random colors.

The first thing I’d do is choose one color you’d like to use for your website. After you do that, hop over to an online color palette generator to find complementary colors to the color you have in mind:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/csd-3.5

This way, you’ll have a nice, harmonious color combination for your website.

And don't forget to leave a lot of white space!

Transparent Images

I’ve come across several members’ websites where logos with white backgrounds were overlaid on top of colorful headers – Ouch! Needless to say, it doesn’t look too professional.

In these cases, you want to get rid of your background color so that the logo blends in nicely with the image beneath it.

Here’s a website where you can get this done fast: https://clippingmagic.com

Browser & Device Compatibility

After you build your website, make sure it looks fine across different browsers and devices. Any design/layout issues are sure to increase your bounce rate and cause frustration. You can identify any issues by testing out your website here:

Browser Compatibility: http://browsershots.org

Device Emulator: http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com (despite the URL name, you can test more than mobile phones)

Navigation Menus

I’ve often seen navigation menus spill into two lines because of too many categories and/or really long category names.

As a viewer, the number of menu options and/or amount of menu text make these websites look cluttered and overwhelming. If possible, try to keep your main menu to one line.

To close out, here’s what you DON’T want your website to look like (not a WA member):

http://www.riversideartcenter.org

And here’s an example of what it could look like:

http://www.helpscout.net/blog

- Stephan