Is your website easy to navigate? Do your visitors know what your company does? Is the layout understandable? Are you getting enough readership on your blog?
If you answered 'no' to any of these questions, it might be time to rethink your website design and learn how to improve a website.
The internet is full of poorly made websites that miss the mark--both on their technical elements and their graphic design. In order to stand out from the crowd, you have to create a functional, interactive, and beautiful website design.
It's time to end low-quality, poorly designed websites, once and for all! Here are some web design tips on how to improve a website--so you can be sure you're headed in the right direction.
7 Tips for How to Improve a Website with a Better Web Design
In the digital age, it's not enough to just have an online presence. To bring readers to your site and keep them engaged, your website design needs to be at the top of its game.
Let's take a look at some tips, tricks, and shortcuts for creating cutting edge website design.
1. Keep It Simple
55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website. This short attention span means that you need to create a powerful first impression--without overwhelming the visitor.
Avoid using complicated animations, bad stock photos, or long blocks of content without any breaks. Instead, grab the reader's focus with short sections of content broken up by headers, bullet points, numbered lists, and relevant photographs.
Don't use overused terminology like groundbreaking, innovative, next generation, or cutting edge. These words are used by thousands of companies out there, and a lot of them will have lost meaning with the readers.
2. Don't Shy Away From White Space
For a clean, readable web design that hits on your brand's aesthetics, white space can be a powerful tool.
Also known as "negative space," white space refers to the areas around elements on a page--like text or photos--that are empty. It's an essential design element, allowing you to break up your content and make the website more readable.
Look through your website and identify pages that are lacking white space. This is a great opportunity to find content that isn't necessary to the purpose of the page--like a misplaced photo or a block of text that isn't concise enough. Then reorganize your content so that it flows well and leaves plenty of open space.
3. Design Without Color First
Simplicity is key. If you overload your website with too many colors and design elements, you'll lose the reader's focus.
When you're designing the website, try shifting everything into a gray-scale visual design. Starting out with shades of gray will help you assess your website's design from a fresh perspective. After you've added photography, include color to your website, one at a time.
This will help to prevent an "over-designed" website and highlight only the most relevant design elements.
4. Simplify Navigation
Limiting your visitors' navigation options might seem like a poor choice, but it can actually help make your content simpler and easier to understand.
Instead of overwhelming your visitors with all the different links and pages, keep things streamlined to guide them to your best content.
To make your website's navigation the best that it can be, you need to make sure that visitors can easily find what they're looking for! Try to avoid multi-tier drop-down navigation and long lists of links in the header or sidebar.
Unless readers can find exactly what they're looking for within less than a minute of scrolling through your website, they'll leave and find a competitor that offers a better user experience. Make sure your website design is clean, easy to use, and responsive for mobile users.
5. Use the Squint Test
The only way to assess the successful (and unsuccessful) aspects of your website is to see it from the visitor's perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the design of it all and forget who you're creating the website for.
To perform the squint test, back up a few feet from your computer screen and squint. While most of your screen will become blurry and unfocused, the larger, more colorful, and more prominent features will stand out right away.
With this method, you can quickly identify what a first-time visitor is more likely to notice when they're skimming your website.
Are these features the most important part of your website? Are they what you want your visitors to notice first? This is a good opportunity to evaluate the features that stick out the most and make adjustments.
6. Use Social Media Share Buttons
A well-designed website doesn't mean much if you aren't using it to share what you have to offer. Social share buttons aren't just links to your social media page--they're usually icons throughout your website which allows you to share the page without clogging up your site with more links. It's a subtle and less pushy way to advertise your social media accounts.
Place share buttons for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest throughout your site. You can put them in your header, footer, or sidebar.
7. Use Colors Properly
Nothing kills a website design faster than a terrible color scheme. If your colors are clashing or don't match with the tone of your business, your website might seem tacky and unprofessional.
To help you find a great color, you might consider taking some inspiration from nature. You can use your own camera to take pictures of the nature around your city or find one on the web. Then use a color picker to select a proper color.
When it comes to natural, gorgeous colors, mother nature's color palette tends to never fail. Nonetheless, this may not match your industry so do be sure to consider what your market audience likes.
The Bottom Line
Are you ready to put a plan in place to renovate your website? Are you hoping to take your website design to the next level?
With these web design tips, you can learn how to improve a website with enhanced web design techniques--for both the aesthetics and the navigation.
Looking for more website design tips and tricks? Check out our blog for more.