Starry Eyes Media
Contact

Top 5 Ways To Make Your Website Look More Sophisticated

by | Dec 29, 2022 | Learning, Web Design

Do you struggle to get traffic to your site? Do people tell you your site is ugly? Well, it may be time to update your website into this decade. According to WebFX, 94% of first impressions on a website are based on the design of the site

This means that if your site isn’t modern, clean, and sophisticated it could be driving potential customers away. Your website may have served you well when you opened your business in 2005, but it’s almost 20 years later! Get with the times and create a modern website

What is a modern website? Well, a modern site has features like accessibility-friendly alt text, fast loading times, and wide browser and device compatibility.  

Optimize for Mobile

With 70% of users relying on mobile devices to access the internet, it’s safe to say a large amount of online traffic comes from phones.  So, it would only make sense to make sure your website is functional on mobile and tablet devices. 74% of users say that mobile-friendly websites make them more likely to come back.

Ensuring you’ve optimized for mobile devices is essential to increasing traffic among all devices. While your site may look great on a desktop computer, it may look completely different on mobile. Some elements could appear in the wrong order, graphics could be too large, fonts too small to read, or certain elements could be overlapping.

Keep Animations Simple

Don’t overdo it with your animations or you could end up turning your website into something out of the early 2000s. 

Modern scroll effects might include having a tasteful graphic move as you scroll in order to bring your attention to important elements of the page; it does not mean having a thousand different elements like dancing dolphins and swaggering cowboys going down the page because the tech person who built your page two decades ago thought they looked cool. Besides being tacky, heavy animations can slow down loading on mobile devices.

Having scroll effects on certain graphics, hover effects on buttons, and parallax effects on photos can be a nice way to integrate animations into your site. Modern effects are subtle while still adding some flare.

Simplify Font Choices

As a simple rule of thumb, you don’t need 6+ different fonts on one page. Two to three fonts work for headings, subheadings, and body copy. On the other hand, using a different font for each section is hard to look at, and harder to read.

When you’re making your choices, don’t drive away your customer with bad font design. Script-based fonts can make it difficult to read and may be confusing to viewers, so they should be used sparingly, if at all. 

Keep your font choices simple and true to your branding. 

Select High Quality, Full-Width Images

Full-width images—1600 pixels or more wide— used well can look more impressive than smaller photos. Having a large featured image can also show off your products/services. Large pictures help draw in the eye while small or blurry images can be a turn-off to potential customers—bad product images can sink your e-commerce.

However you’re displaying the images on your website, make sure they’re sized appropriately and aren’t being forced to display larger than they actually are, rendering them pixelated and off-putting. Resizing images to match their display size on the webpage also keeps their file size down. Then, small file sizes will help your pages load as quickly and smoothly as they should. A modern website needs to load quickly.

Use a Maximum of 4-6 Colors

An overcrowded website that features lot of small photos and different colored text.

If your branding is fully developed, stick with the color palette in your professional branding guide

Without a professional branding plan from experienced designers, you might feel at a loss when trying to choose what colors to use on your website. Here’s the best advice for that: Don’t go overboard with the colors. Use 2-3 main colors, and up to 2-3 additional colors as accents. 

You don’t need every page, and every font, to be a different color. Having a few main colors is enough to convey your message: use your branding colors, and stick to your chosen color palette.

If you don’t feel equal to the task of modernizing your website on your own, contact us for a consultation. 

Meet
Comments

Top 5 Ways To Make Your Website Look More Sophisticated

by | Dec 29, 2022 | Learning, Web Design

0 Comments