Design is an important part of making your company's website successful. When customers visit your site, they want to be able to easily navigate through pages, and find all the information they need with as little effort as possible.
A big part of this ease comes from keeping your website's design clean, simple, and visually appealing. This includes choosing the correct fonts, colors, graphics, and the placement of these items on different pages. Check out these tips on how you can improve your website's design, using the great tools available from Atwill Media!
When you start writing copy for your website, you're going to want to select a good font. But what makes a good font?
The basic ideas that you need to consider when selecting a font include its readability, whether it goes well with your design theme, and if the colors you choose for the font work well with the rest of the colors on your site.
There are a ton of fonts to choose from in Atwill's library, as well as plenty of color options. It's best to experiment with different options, to see which work best for your design!
It's also important to choose the correct point size for your text. Don't make the text so small that visitors have to pull out a magnifying glass to read it, and don't make it so large that it makes your scroll bar as thin as a piece of paper.
Colors are a big part of making your website visually appealing. You want the colors you choose to compliment each other, not cause headaches for your customers.
It's best to keep your color selections to 2 or 3 choices. Any more colors and you'll end up causing your site to look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
If you need help deciding what colors compliment each other, check out a color wheel. Colors that are opposite each other on the wheel are ones that compliment each other the best.
Your graphics are what draw customers' eyes to important elements of your site. So you want to select graphics that are both engaging, and clear.
Graphics can be anything from photographs to illustrations, and usually, a combination of the two items makes the most visually striking design.
When you select your graphics, make sure they compliment the design of your website. For example, if you're designing a website for a towing business, you want to include pictures of your tow trucks, people working on cars, and damaged vehicles. These pics show visitors what services you offer, without having to spell it out in a separate paragraph.
You also have to consider the quality of your images when putting them on your site. You always want to use high quality images to reduce the risk of a messy looking website. Low resolution images often make a website look unprofessional and sloppy.
For Atwill Media, we recommend using images that are at least 190 x 150 pixels large, and no more than a 32 MB file size.
None of these tips are going to matter, however, if you don't arrange them on your page in a way that makes sense and looks great.
The best thing to do is avoid cluttering up your page with too much info. That may have worked back in the '90s or early 2000's, but this is the modern age, and people look for sleek, simple websites.
This is especially true for your home page. Put the important on there, but use images and call to action buttons to encourage people to explore your site, rather than throwing all the info at them at one time.
A great tip to practice is utilizing a visual hierarchy. This means arranging your page elements in a way that lets the visitor's eyes travel along the page from top to bottom, and left to right. It's just like reading a book, you want to guide eyes along the page in an orderly fashion, so include your most important info in the top left, and work left to right until you reach the bottom.
Atwill Media's customizable websites make it easy to experiment with different tools and options to create the best website for your business! Don't be afraid to try out the many features available at your disposal!
Contributor Caleb Hennington is a 23-year-old writer, who manages the Atwill Media and FGmarket blogs. He graduated from Arkansas State University in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
When not writing, Caleb enjoys camping, running, collecting comic books, and binge-watching shows on Netflix.