How To Build The Perfect Website
Creating great and valuable content attracts visitors to your website. This, in turn, creates a loyal audience that likes and trusts you. However, what if you never attract the attention of that audience?
What if your website visitors take one look at your valuable content and they leave because your website looks boring, bland, and substandard? You’ll lose your target audience before they even start reading, and your content won’t take root.
So, design is crucial. A flawless design creates a welcoming first impression. It engages and draws in your visitors so they engage with your content. Do you want to create an appetite for your content? Here are six tips for creating the perfect website.
FREE Checklist: 10 Online Business Mistakes You MUST AvoidHow To Design A Good Website
1. Think about Your Visitors
A perfect website design starts with a clear understanding of your audience and who you’re targeting. If you want to pick colours, images, and typefaces that resonate with your target audience, you must know them and know what theyĂll respond to.
So what should you know about your target market?
Preferably, you need to know their age group, gender, and education level. Also, knowing what motivates them, their problems, and other companies they like buying from can help you create a website that resonates with your target audience.
2. Keep Your Fonts Simple
One of the key website layout tips is having great readability. This doesn’t mean you should use just one font. However, don’t overdo it, and aim to maintain just one or two text elements within the same font set.
Experiment with fonts to see what resonates more with your target audience. Remember, stylized and dramatic fonts are hard to read and they make your website look substandard. The purpose of a font is to make your content stand out and give your words personality. This means that illegible font will hurt your website.
3. Use Colors That Make Sense to Your Target Audience
Knowing who your target audience is will give you an idea of what colours will appeal to them. But as you start out, pick two main colors to represent your brand.
Having said that, make sure you choose predominant colors that will make your readers remember you and set you apart from your competitors. So how can you pick two colours? Look at the consumer goods your target audience already buys. What colours appeal to them? Begin by looking around for colour combinations that are being used to sell to your target market and take inspiration from them.
4. Tell Your Story Using Appealing Images
Finding a good image that works with your content can be a dilemma, because you need to write your article first and then look for images that work perfectly with that article. So, this feels like one more thing you have to do.
However, the effort is worth it for an appealing website format. You don’t want your words to sit lifeless and lonely on the page, so it’s good to pair them with a compelling image. A great image gives readers an invitation to engage with your content. If you pick an attractive image that creates a bit of curiosity, it will draw readers into your headline and the first paragraph of your post.
5. Order Your Information Hierarchically
Visual hierarchy helps readers to navigate through your website easily and absorb information in the order you prefer.
Begin by looking at the information on your website pages. What do you want visitors to see first? Perhaps it’s your website’s name. What do you want them to notice next? Maybe it’s your headline or the image you’ve used in your first post.
Once they notice the name of your website and you’ve drawn their attention into your content, then what do what them to see? Make the most crucial information stand out. Make it bolder and larger. And give the important information some breathing room by adding white space. This draws attention.
Then make the next-most-crucial information less bold and smaller. And as you go down the visual hierarchy ladder, remember that the less important the information is, the less visual “weight” it should have.
6. Keep Everything Together with a Style Guide
Now you have the right colours, fonts, attractive images, and visual hierarchy to create your flawless website. Then what?
Maintain consistency using a simple style guide for your website layout templates. And it doesn’t have to be a complex ten-page document. It can be as simple as the following:
- Open a Word document and note your official colors.
- Create a file name for your official logo or header artwork.
- Note the resources for images so that you’ll know where to find attractive images in the future.
- Keep adding to this document as you continue making more design decisions about your website.
The process of creating a new website is much more automated than many people realize. The more difficult task becomes figuring out which site is best suited for your needs. There are several website builder programs available and a little bit of planning goes a long way.
Free Checklist: 10 Online Business Mistakes To Avoid
We all make mistakes. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. In the world of online business, you’re going to make some minor boo-boos and some cataclysmic mistakes. It’s all part of the learning process. Although mistakes are going to happen, you can create the perfect website and avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that are lurking around the corner. Download my free checklist, The Top 10 Mistakes in Online Business, and avoid the false moves and slipups that even veteran online entrepreneurs and bloggers make.