5 Website Design Tips For a Professional Site
The internet is a beautiful place, captivating its users with millions of web pages and social media profiles that are created every day. When you’re building a website, you want to stand out from your competition.
Attracting the attention of internet users and making them stay on your website is a lot harder than it looks.You need to have an intuitive website that’s attention-grabbing, yet not flashy. Your content has to reflect your company’s mission and vision, but still be easily understandable. Your website needs to be user-friendly and approachable while maintaining a professional and well put together look.A solution for all of this? Great web design.
Web design is often compared to fashion - the trends are always changing, and they all seem to pass fast, yet the basis of good design is always the same.
Creating a professional looking website is no longer a job for experts. SITE123’s highly intuitive platform offers a broad range of fantastic web design tools you can use to create an amazing website in minutes. There is a huge number of things you can tweak to create a visually compelling and attention-grabbing website that will keep your customers coming.
Here at SITE123, we pride ourselves on helping our customers succeed, and their businesses flourish. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the best tips and tricks you can use to create a professional website.
Before you start designing your site, make sure you keep these best website design tips in mind:
Table of Contents:
1. Keep your homepage minimalistic and free of clutter
Your landing page is one of the first things a customer sees when they click on your website. As it’s a page that can literally “make or break” a new client, people are often compelled to fill it up with as much content as possible. The entire internet is cluttered with pop-ups, banners, icons and badges, and your website should be an exception. To project a professional image, your site needs to be designed in a clean and polished way. You can achieve that by decluttering your landing page and highlighting only the most important information. Choose a neutral website color themes (black, gray, beige) that adds to the professional look you’re trying to project. You can ready-made color schemes to compose your final professional website design in SITE123’s editing menu. This feature is right along with the other tools you can use improve appearance under the Design tab. Select a flat design website template that projects your brand’s image best. Coordinate the images with the color scheme and the page layout. SITE123 offers dozens of beautiful, pre-made website designs you can choose from in the website design editor menu. All of our layouts will automatically sync your site color scheme with the design of the central theme. That way, you can have a fantastic, clutter-free site with just a few clicks.
2. Design with visual hierarchy in mind
Visual hierarchy in web design, is a term that describes the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees. In your field of perception, visual contrast between forms and images is what creates that order. Visual hierarchy in web design, is what makes designs compelling and ad campaigns memorable. That’s why you should never start designing your site without it in mind. The human eye moves in two different ways – from left to right and top to bottom. By using the eye’s natural tendency to scan images in a grid pattern, you can increase the response your content creates. An excellent way to do that is to use white space. White space is the space between elements on your web page and is designed to not be used to host content or images. White space, also sometimes referred to as negative space, can be a great tool you can use to accentuate the visual hierarchy of your content. If you have a sign-up button on your site, make sure there are no buttons or links surrounding it that can drive your clients’ attention away. Make the button stand out by putting it at the center of your page, as it’s the first place people see when they open your site. Use contrasting colors on neutral backgrounds to make your content easier to read, and use visual hierarchy to arrange it by importance.
3. Take a leaf out of other people’s books
Starting a business from scratch is hard. Designing your website from scratch is even harder. If you want your business to succeed, you need to offer clients and exceptional service that’s built on the base of that particular industry. That means that you can’t run your fashion line the same way you would a construction company. To have your business flourish, you’ll need to take a leaf out of other people’s books. Do a bit or research to find what your competition is up to and see how similar businesses have set up their sites. If a successful barbershop has a landing page that features lots of images and a portfolio, take inspiration from that when designing a website for your own hairdressing business. Starting a transportation company? Take a look at how your competition is doing. If their site gets the most response from videos, make sure you include them when designing your own page. Here at SITE123, we take great pride in our creative and innovative client base. There’s nothing wrong with finding web design ideas in other people’s work if it will help you design a compelling and a professional site. Building a website with SITE123 is easy
4. Create easy to read website content
When it comes to gaining your customer's attention, the text comes second only to images. Written text is your client’s first look at your brand – what it stands for, what you think of your customers and how you run your business. Apart from being well-written, your text should also be easy to read. That means clear, dark fonts on neutral backgrounds and easily navigable paragraphs. Web designers often overlook how their designs will impact the readability of the website content. That often leads to great and compelling content not being read and you losing potential clients. SITE123 has lots of ready-made layouts, all of which are optimized to present your text in a visible, easy to read manner. If you want to create a professional looking website, we also suggest you choose one or two different fonts and stick to them on all of your pages. All of the themes on SITE123 come with their own inbuilt fonts.
5. Make a Mobile-Friendly Website
In 2016, 43.6 percent of all internet traffic was produced through mobile phones. Statistics predict that in 2017, that number will exceed 50 percent. That’s too big of a number to overlook. With so many people using mobile phones as their primary method of surfing the internet, mobile-friendly website has never been more important when building a website. Although mobile internet is getting faster and faster, it still can’t compete with wi-fi when it comes to loading sites. Not having a mobile-friendly website website means a much longer loading time, something not many internet users have the time or the patience for. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch. SITE123’s extremely advanced algorithms automatically optimize your site for all devices. 
