Creating a website for your business can be a difficult task. You have to balance the demands of a variety of stakeholders, and you’ll frequently run against roadblocks that prevent fresh ideas from surfacing.
For nearly six years, I was the design manager for a huge company’s surrey website design, and throughout that time, I lost sight of what our target customers really required. It’s known as “tunnel vision.” When you’re working on the same website, it’s helpful to take a step back and consider new ideas. That is the point of this article.
The tips, methods, shortcuts, and general advice that follows will help you create a superb website design. Are you willing to give any of these a shot in order to improve your site design?
1) Start with a grayscale design and then add color.
If your web designer builds wireframes before graphic designs, you already know how important it is to start with shades of gray. Convert your wireframe to a grayscale visual design, add your photography, and then apply color to individual design elements one by one.
This will help to avoid an “overdesigned” website by focusing attention on only the items that require it.
2) Create quick page prototypes with Keynote (Mac).
To design rapid prototypes of web sites, landing pages, call to actions, and other web interface elements, you don’t require Photoshop. There’s a whole underground culture around creating mockups with Keynote (Apple’s version of PowerPoint).
In Keynote, there’s even a repository of user interface design templates for wireframing, prototyping, and testing mobile and web apps.
3) Incorporate web fonts into your company’s style guide.
It’s 2015, and if your corporate style guide doesn’t contain web fonts, you should consider including them so that your website follows the same guidelines as your business publications and collateral.
Google Fonts is a wonderful place to start if you haven’t done so already. Find a good web font and include it in your business style guide so you may use it everywhere.
4) Destroy all social media symbols
You put in so much effort to lure people to your website, and now you want them to leave? When you post social media icons in a prominent spot on your website, such as the header, you’re doing exactly that. In the footer, bury the icons.
You want them to stay on your website, learn about your services, and possibly inquire about them, not look at photographs of workplace picnics and bowling adventures on Facebook. People should be directed to your website from social media, not the other way around.
5) Remove the slideshow/carousel from the equation.
When the homepage slideshow/image carousel originally became popular, it was a technique to get a lot of information on your website’s first page. The issue is that most visitors do not remain long enough on the page to see all of the tiles/messages.
Furthermore, the messaging and pictures are frequently irrelevant to your prospect’s initial visit. What is the most important thing a website user should take away from their visit? Promote that one item, which is usually what your company does in layman’s words, and ignore anything else.
6) Make navigation easier
Restricting your visitors’ options may seem counterintuitive, yet it might really assist them in finding the most useful content. Simplify your navigation rather than bombarding your website users with links to every page.
Remove dropdown menus, especially multi-tier dropdown navigation, which can only be navigated by the most experienced mouse user, and go even farther by minimizing the number of links in your website’s header or sidebar.
7) Get rid of the sidebars.
For the past 10 years, the sidebar has been a very popular web design trend, particularly on blogs. Many businesses are discovering that removing sidebars from their blogs encourages readers to focus on the content and the call to action at the conclusion.
The removal of the sidebar from our company blog resulted in a 35 percent increase in clicks on call to action graphics.
Check out the new CMS Hub theme collection on the Envato store to try out this strategy.
8) Look to nature for color inspiration.
Are you having trouble selecting the right color scheme for your website or a call to action graphic? Nature is a great source of inspiration. You can either use your own camera to photograph natural beauties near you or search the web for landscape photographs, then choose a hue using a color picker. Nature’s kaleidoscope of colors never disappoints.
9) Take a break from your computer.
I believe that solid planning is the foundation of good design. Putting your thoughts on paper or a whiteboard can help you cycle through a design, tweaking and adding detail as you go. Drawing on a whiteboard can also help to make the design process more collaborative and allow for input from other team members.
It’s also simple to erase a pencil from paper or a marker from a whiteboard and make rapid modifications, and once you’ve got something concrete to work with, take a picture with your phone and start working on screen.
10) Create mood boards on Pinterest.
When you’re gathering inspiration and ideas for a new website or rebuilding a section of your existing website, you’ll need a means to keep everything in one place for future reference.
Did you know you can make a mood board on Pinterest with your favorite images, colors, layouts, patterns, sample websites, and concept material? Another fantastic benefit of Pinterest is that other designers build and post mood boards as well, and they’ve already gathered a wealth of information for you.
11) Increase the size of your typeface.
In web design, typography is really crucial. On a computer screen, text is difficult to see, so make the vital points stand out.
Increasing font sizes, especially for headings and key blocks of text, is one approach to accomplish this. Increase the size of your regular font as well.
12) Make use of white space.
It may seem counterintuitive to consider whitespace a hack, but I analyze websites every day that could benefit from additional whitespace. It is not necessary to fill every empty space on the screen.
Despite the fact that whitespace and minimalism are currently fashionable, too many businesses attempt to squeeze everything into a small space, or worse, “above the fold.” Allow your design to breathe, and your website visitors will have an easier time finding what they’re looking for.
13) Perform a squint test
Want to know what’s most visible on your website in a hurry? Squint and step back from your computer screen. The majority of the scene will become hazy, with just the larger, more colorful, and noteworthy features remaining visible.