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How much do you know about designing a website? Do you know the difference between web design durham for e-commerce sites, business sites, and blogs? Do you know how to turn your blog into an e-commerce site? There are lots of questions around web design so hopefully, we’ll answer some of them for you today.
These days, just about anyone can build their own website. This was been a huge blessing for bloggers, meaning that you can create a website with very little, or even no financial investment, a critical part of setting up your business. However, if you want your website to be effective, it needs to be well designed. This means that you need to have at least a basic understanding of web design. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to spend years or even months studying Web Design Colorado Springs: simply understanding the some of the key principles will take you a long way. Website design isn’t as difficult as a lot of people might think, especially when there are guides online to help people step by step. If you’re creating your website on Bluehost, there are multiple templates that can be used by beginners to ensure your website looks professional. To create your own website, you could check out the bluehost guide here to ensure you create it correctly. If you’re not using Bluehost, make sure to follow our advice!
Here are 7 website design tips that will help you build a professional, effective, and engaging blog.
1. Limit the Number of Colors Your Use
Effective use of color can be very impactful in web design. Strong, bold colors can capture your website’s attention, while more subtle tones can be incredibly effective in conveying your brand values. However, this doesn’t mean you should go overboard and use too many colors.
For the strongest, most impactful website design, a limited number of colors is best: usually two or three colors are ideal. This design principle applies equally when designing other graphics, whether social media content, bullet journals, or Sticker It stickers. When designing an of these materials, it is generally a good idea to stick to two or three colors only.
The two or three colors you use should also be your brand’s colors, the colors that you use across all your marketing materials and general communications. If you don’t have brand colors, know is a good time to pick some that reflect the values that you want to convey on your blog.
2. Be Conscious of Font
Another important consideration in web design is the fonts you use. As with colors, you should only use two to three different fonts, maximum, on your site. This could be one font for your logo, another for your headlines, and a third font for text body content. If you try to add additional fonts into the mix this looks messy and unprofessional.
Pick fonts that best reflect your brand’s style, such as more traditional fonts if you want to convey conservative values, or more modern fonts if you have a more radical, dynamic brand. Another useful tip is to stick to the sans serif family of fonts – these are fonts like Arial and Tahoma. These clean, simple fonts have the best readability on a computer screen.
3. Use White Space
When designing your website, it is important to think about not only the things you put in your website, but also the things you leave out. Specifically, you should be conscious of including white space on your site.
White space may be in the form of margins and spaces between blocks of content. These spaces make your site more readable, and produce a clean, modern look. On the other hand, having too much content crammed together, or too much content at all, can make your website look messy. Even more importantly, it means that you core message will get lost in all the noise.
If you’re not sure how to add more whitespace to your blog, simply take out everything that is not necessary to achieve your goals. This will strip it back to only include the essentials and make your site more impactful and effective. Of course there is also a balance of white space and design features you should take full advantage of. No one wants to see a completely blank screen with text. If you’re wanting to find new ways to use fill unnecessary white space effectively with trending design ideas, you might want to view something such as these Elementor tutorials as an example. This could allow for inspiration into how to design your new webpages with some great elements.
4. Plan Your Structure
As part of making sure you have enough whitespace, not to mention making sure you include all other important elements, you need to plan your structure. Like any kind of content, if you want to make sure your website is effective, it is absolutely essential that you plan your website’s structure in advance.
Planning your structure means deciding how many and what pages you will have, their headings, and how they will all fit together. You should also pre-determine which pages will be listed on your main menu, if you’ll have any sub-pages under your main pages, and what will be on your footer menu. Finally, think about what you’ll include on your homepage and if you are going to have any hidden pages.
5. Keep Things Consistent
Consistency is absolutely essential is web design. Consistency will make your site more professional and cohesive, as well as reinforcing your branding. Consistency means making sure you religiously use the same colors, the same fonts, the same layout on every page, and that all design elements are the same.
For example, all graphics should be in the same style. Ideally, you should create templates for graphics like page headers and blog graphics. In making things consistent, make sure they are not only consistent with each other, but with your overall branding: using the same colors, fonts, and design elements across everything.
6. Be Thoughtful with Headers and Sub-Headers
Headers and sub-headers are important for the readability of your site. Breaking up your text and other content makes it easier for the customer to skim, meaning they are more likely to stay on your page longer and check out all of your site, which is ultimately one of your primary goals.
All of your pages and posts should have a strong and clear H1 header on the top of the page and H2, H3 and possibly H4 sub-headers throughout the text. Using the right number of headers not only create structure and improve readability, it also helps with flow.
7. Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
These days, it is absolutely essential that your site is mobile friendly. This is because it is more likely that your readers will be viewing your site on a mobile device. In fact, figures show that 62% of users access the internet on a smart phone or other mobile device.
Being mobile-friendly doesn’t mean that you site looks like a contracted size of the desktop version on a smaller screen. Rather, it should be a unique version designed for the smaller format without losing impact or the effect of design. Make sure to create both versions, and test your site on both desktop and mobile devices before you launch your website.
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Hi Angela,
Your article is an interesting read with actionable steps. However, I must add that making your site easy to navigate is a fantastic website tip since it helps the user to walk through your website and find what he wants seamlessly. Moreover, using calls-to-action is essential as well. It tells readers what next to do after reading your blogs.
Thanks a lot for sharing!
We all need a reminder of the basics from time to time. Good tips Angela.
Use of whitespace is indeed critical. Great tips! Glad to see a fellow Medium user!