If you are in the online business world a well-designed website is a must. You need to show your brand personality in the best, best, BEST way possible.
Your website is the face of your brand and if it has inconsistencies or looks disorganized, it may cost you a lost of potential clients.
But no stress! We are here to help you. In this blog post, we’re giving our checklist that we use each time we’re preparing to launch a new site. From a DIY-er turned professional designer, we’re sharing all the steps you need to follow if you want to design a beautiful and effective website.
✔️ And at the end of this post, you have a FREE pdf about this to help you even more.
Let’s start with the most important aspects of a website design.
01. Typography
This is an essential detail that can be easily overlooked.
Keeping the typography consistent for all the headings, subheadings, and body text through ALL your pages will make a huge difference in how your website looks.
Just by doing this, you will look more professional and detailed oriented.
And you are probably wondering: how do I find my fonts?
You can look for inspiration on Pinterest and even other websites. There is a Chrome extension you can use called WhatFont where you can get the name of the font of almost any website.
Then you will need to look for the font to download and our favorite font sites are:
02. Colors
One way to clutter up your beautiful minimalist website is by using too many distracting colors and not using them consistently.
If you haven’t yet worked with a brand strategist to design your brand, don’t sweat it! Start by selecting ~3 colors that you feel represent your brand values and the type of content you will be sharing.
We like to stick to 3 shades of one color. You need to keep in mind the 60-30-10 rule when considering how you will apply these colors to your site.
What is this rule about?
Your lightest color will represent 60% of all color usage on your site. Meaning this will likely be the color of your background.
30% will be your medium shade, and will likely represent delicate accents like your box shadows.
10% will be your darkest shade and will be best used for bold accents like headers, buttons, and links.
And of course, our favorite way to select a gorgeous color palette is using:
03. Images
Your images need to have a theme, otherwise, it will look a little messy and you don’t want that.
You should only be selecting high-quality images and ensure that the style and filter are consistent throughout.
Remember that everything needs to match, the filter of your images has to match with the colors you choose in the last step.
This doesn’t mean that everything needs to be green, pink, or the color you choose but they need to look good together and create a nice consistency in your website.
And some useful SEO tips we can give you are: make sure to compress your images to 1MB or smaller to improve loading time. Title your images using relevant keywords and add an image description for each image used on your site.
Our favorite places to find high-quality stock images are:
04. Call to action
Your website needs to sell for you, it has to act like your best salesperson.
You need to consider your site as your personal corner of the internet where you can showcase your offerings, connect with your customers, and guide them to book your services.
But as this is your space, you are responsible for guiding your readers through the website and showing them where to go.
Your website has a purpose, be sure to include the right call to action buttons to direct your audience to the goal you’d like to accomplish.
There is nothing worse than a confusing website, avoid confusion at all costs!!
05. Responsiveness
Just because you’ve designed a stunning website on your computer, doesn’t mean it’s going to look the same on your phone.
That’s why you need to adapt each of your pages to be responsive on all devices.
Like bigger or smaller computers, apple devices, android devices, phones, tablets… You can’t predict this.
So we suggest testing it out in advance if you want to avoid headaches once it’s live.
How to manage all these website design elements?
Feeling a little overwhelmed by all the small moving parts necessary for creating an impactful website? We’ve got you covered! We decided to create an easy to follow website design checklist for you to keep track in a super organized way of the 5 elements we showed you in this post.
The best part: it’s FREE.
We are doing this because we know the importance of a well-designed website, it can make you stand out and convert more.
So you can get your checklist right now if you want to start building the website of your dreams.
We wish you the best building and designing your website, this is the start of something great for you.
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