Attract More Site Traffic with These Five Web Design Tips
When it comes to websites, what’s outside is equally as important as what’s inside. Sure, you can have the most up-to-date content and the most engaging blog posts, but without the proper design elements supporting it, the experience is as dull as reading a bad book with chunky paragraphs and no line breaks. Fortunately, you don’t need Bill Gates or a four-year computer science degree to teach you software development to figure out how to design an eye-catching website. Here’s five tips that can help you get started:
Start With Paper Sketches
You can’t fully envision what your website should look like without, at the very least, a rough draft. Sketching individual webpages on pieces of paper can help you visualize where specific parts should be. Figure out where signup/login forms should be, where users can navigate to while on the site, where to leave whitespaces, how many paragraphs to have on each page, the amount of margin and padding space for each element, and any images or videos to include.
Research Current Design Trends
Just like how fashion trends come and go, design trends for websites occasionally change to accommodate new technologies and user preferences. Research what your competitors are doing, especially the big players. Look at their website to look for color schemes, content structures, and design patterns that make for an attractive layout. Although this sounds like an unethical strategy, the developer community, for the most part, is open to sharing their ideas and projects with like-minded peers. Try to make this practice of browsing through modern web layouts and design techniques into a habit to keep your own website fresh and relevant.
Include Only Relevant Information
There’s a limited amount of space in a webpage to feature text-based content. Between the header and footer and the sides of the webpage, you have a few hundred pixels to dedicate to information. Make sure every word counts by only including relevant details about your company or yourself if you’re planning on using the website as a personal blog. Make sure to divide the information into easily readable chunks between three to five sentences. Giving your visitors a large block of text to stare at will cause them to lose interest and navigate away from your site.
Master Design Tools
Today, web development is simplified into a format that’s much easier to learn. In the past, you had to write dozens of lines of code just to render the simplest design attributes, from squiggly lines to blinking effects. Fast forward to today, technologies, such as CSS3 and Bootstrap, are making development life easier and faster. Use comprehensive design tutorials and WebDev guide to learn and master proper markup syntax, standard design principles, and advanced functions that make the site more interactive and responsive.
Consider a Content Management System
People mistakenly think of CMS as a software product that you download and install on your computer. However, in a nutshell, content management systems are actually an editing service that you can access online. There is a slate of different CMS available, many of which are built on top of standalone CM frameworks. Features for each content management system differ broadly, but most of them include online publishing, version control, and data indexing and retrieval. It’s the intrinsic attribute of content management systems to separate the design elements from its content. Although there is a learning curve involved when learning CMS, it’s definitely a lot more friendly for people who’ve never coded in their life. The one drawback of CMS compared to hand-coding websites is that it leaves little room for customizing the site to fit your exact specifications.
Final Thoughts
When building an eye-catching website, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Experiment as much as you want by trying different color combinations, background images, and text formats until you find the right blend of content and presentation. Use a version control system like Git to keep track of your design changes and to be able to revert back if needed.
