Do you find yourself staring at your website, feeling like it looks DIYed, but aren’t sure how to change it?
When it comes to websites, the devil is in the details. Those details come together to either give your website a professional vibe, or make it look like a DIY project.
In my years of website design, I’ve met so many amazingly talented women who provide excellent service for their clients, but have a website that doesn’t translate that.
The result is, they tend to attract tire kickers and penny pinchers.
If you can relate, here are five small tweaks that you can make to instantly upgrade your website and give it a more polished look.
Upgrade and simplify your fonts and colors
If you are like many service providers I’ve talked to, you probably chose your favorite colors for your brand and stopped there. Maybe your fonts are a few you found on Canva that were trendy at the time.
But a few years in, you might have realized that the colors you selected aren’t saying what you want them to say.
The truth is, colors say a lot with a little. It’s important to understand the color psychology behind the selections. I talk more about brand colors and how to choose them in this post.
Choose colors that both send the message you want to say, and also appeal to your target market.
When it comes to fonts, don’t just settle with free ones you found on Canva or Pinterest. Font selection is a bit of an art, but you will be miles ahead of most of your competition if you look for a high quality headline font. That likely means you will need to purchase a license. But usually they are a small cost for a big impact on your brand.
Look for fonts that also are in line with your message and who you want to appeal to. I recommend finding one that is versatile and distinctive without being too trendy. You want your fonts to last.
If you have a signature and unique heading font, then you can get away with using a free font for your paragraph font. Just find one that fits well with the style and vine of the heading font.
TIP: Stick to one headline font and a paragraph font. You may use one other accent font, but use it sparingly. Using too many fonts looks messy and unprofessional
Give your website a clean modern feel through your spacing and layout
Very few people who come to your site are going to read every single word on it. They are even less likely to do so if there are walls of long paragraphs, busy layouts with too many elements, That’s why it is important to create a layout that is easy to scan.
Break up your content with bolor, photos, subheadlines, bullet points, and bold call outs.
Designing this way also naturally tends to add in more white space, which is a crucial part of making your website look less cluttered and more high end. But always double check you are leaving space around elements and not cramming too many things together.
And side note: Unless it is a short headline, justify your text left! Left-justified text is much easier to read because our eyes have an easier time going back to the same place on the page each time.
Optimize your images for a more professional website (Size and quality matter!)
Quality images are a huge difference between a website that looks professional and one that looks DIYed.
Start with high quality appealing photos that fit with your overall brand vibe. I highly recommend investing in a brand shoot so that you have a variety of photos you can use throughout your site.
But once you have the photos, don’t just dump them on your website and call it good. Large photos can drag your website’s load time up, and most people won’t wait longer than three seconds for a website to load. If you want your site to have a chance at being seen, compress your images down.
You can use a tool like Adobe Lightroom to bulk compress photos. Or try compressor.io, where you can drag and drop up to 10 photos at a time. This tool will reduce the file size without affecting the quality of the photo.
Create clear call to actions that stand out
A call to action is anywhere on your site where you are asking someone to do something. Usually, that is to click a button, that then takes them to another page.
There is no hard or fast rule about what size and shape a button should be. But the research is clear, people need to know it is a button, and they are more likely to click on it if it is clear what will happen when they do.
Some general guidelines I usually stick to when designing a site are this:
I usually use the same color throughout the website so that people start to recognize that this is a call to action. There are always exceptions to this, but that consistency can help make sure people know it is a call to action.
Use the brightest or most contrasting color in your brand suite. If you don’t have a bright color, then just make sure whatever you use contrasts well against the background you place it on.
Add a hover effect. This is some sort of change that happens to the button when you hover over it. This helps get attention and adds an element of fun for the visitor.
Don’t just slap a “Learn more” on your calls to action and call it good. Think through what you are asking to do and make sure you are using words that incite action and are clear about where the button is going. Instead of something like “Learn more,” try “See a list of services” or “Hear my story.”
The other important thing to consider when adding calls to action is both to make sure there is always one there, but not too many. When visitors are inundated with too many options, they tend to not know what to do so they do nothing. On the flip side, when they run into a dead end, that usually also prompts them to leave.
Make sure your site is mobile friendly
About 65 percent of all website visits now occur on mobile phones. So if your site doesn’t function well or looks funky on a phone, you could be losing over half of your website traffic.
Always edit your website in your website platform’s mobile editor. And once you have done that, don’t just leave it like that and move on. It’s important to periodically check your mobile version to make sure that things don’t get wonky after years of desktop tweaks.
Remember that mobile phones don’t have the processing power that a desktop computer does. So websites often load slower on a phone, especially if they are overloaded with large photos, videos and lots of features. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to pare down the mobile phone version of your website. It’s more important that people see your website in the first place then interact with a flashy animation.
If you use just a few of these website design tips I mentioned above, your site will be far ahead of many of the DIYed sites on the Internet today. You will be on your way to a more professional, user-friendly website that gets your ideal clients to take the next step with you.
But there are many more details that go into a sleek, high converting site. I work with driven female entrepreneurs to elevate their sites so that their website works on their behalf to book more perfect-fit clients. If you know it’s time for a true professional overhaul, let’s talk. Book a call here.
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