Aesthetics Online: Give Your Website A Beauty Makeover

With life constantly moving online through entertainment, social and business means, the good sense in us surely makes us feel that the internet should look as nice as possible. Walking down city streets, you are more attracted to those areas that look well maintained, crisp, clear, beautiful and inviting. Why should your online blog, business website or social media page be any different?

Image from Pixabay.com

Thankfully, taste is such that there are many beautiful examples of this online, and it’s likely you have a group of favorite websites that help you feel like real effort was put into them. It’s likely that the stores you feel look the best are the online stores you shop the most at.

If you’re running an online blog or content farm, it’s likely that you’ve put some effort into making the page appealing and good enough to retain user traffic. But is it really as great as it could be? Do you have the urge to make the most beautiful website you can?

For the most part, using an external service is the best way to be 100% sure about how fantastic your website looks. Having it reviewed by professionals is always the best way forward. Using a service like Bitbranding https://www.bitbranding.co/services/website-design, can help you overcome those basic website design woes. These might include avoiding that ‘universal template’ syndrome that is so popular among the most famous website hosting platforms. The internet doesn’t look as beautiful as it could when everyone is using the same design!

This all depends on how well you adhere to the following design styles and tips. The inner fashionista you have can benefit greatly from the following tips:

UX Design

UX design is a neat little concept. It allows you to figure out how visitors to your website are interacting with what you have on offer. This allows you to figure out exactly how appealing your website is regarding what gets clicked on first, what pages remain open the longest, and how many repeat visits it gets. Statistics of any kind are always very useful, and UX design allows you to make the most of this to no end.

UX design will also allow you to re-review your website interaction every time that you make a change. This way, you can see the benefits or detriments your style decisions have, that is assuming your visitor base hasn’t told you in your website comments already.

Fonts

While it may be tempting to play with unique and refined fonts to make your website stand out or seem more ‘refined,’ a difficult to read font will only serve to alienate viewers. You need your fonts to be as clear as possible. Think of it like the different between reading ages. You want your website to appeal to the most possible people, so using difficult to grasp terms and concepts will stifle that goal in the first place. Using a font that is overly difficult to understand and read, like an overly complex form of cursive, might make your website look pretty, but you’ll find that your website will reduce in visitor numbers significantly.

Consider using a font that’s clearer to read, and moving on from there.

Graphic Design

Your graphic design says a lot about your online portfolio, be that promoting yourself or a business. Do you have a logo, and what form of logo is it? What does it depict, and how does it come across? This can extend to all areas of your website. Are you using custom borders and custom design layouts? Is this hurting the navigability of your website or helping it? These are all worthy questions. If you haven’t a clue where to begin, consider getting the professional opinion of a freelance graphic designer – or use a unique service like the one mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Color Design

How are your colors working for the overall cohesive whole of your website? Are they helping it, or making the website look disjointed and messy? Using tips from fashion can work in your favour here. A few calm, matching colors can help your online presence seem trim, correct and proper.

The best use of color design is color design that is barely noticed. Despite your efforts towards making your website look as beautiful as possible, you should understand that bold, flashy colors are not the place to begin. Use something unintrusive, something that helps present your text, images and fonts in a way that’s appealing, and doesn’t take away from the whole of the piece itself.

Social Media Integration

How smooth is your social media integration? Depending on what widgeting services you use, this could be much more unintrusive than you think. There are many different ways to embed tweets, Facebook posts, and other social media considerations without placing a gaudy embedded tile on the front of your page. Consider keeping a ‘live update’ panel somewhere on your page, either hosted by your website hosting firm or directly embedded into your website with HTML editing itself.

Be sure though, that this serves as a necessary and useful means of gaining followers. This is the only purpose it should serve. What is the point of keeping a social media widget on your profile to link to other articles or store items, when the layout of your store or blog should do that for you in the first place? If you find that you’re relying on these social media widgets to lend navigability to your website, it’s likely that you need to start from scratch and assess how you’d like the website to function, rather than look. That can come later, in which case this guide will always remain here.

Advertisements

Advertisements can be one of the best things for your website, or one of the worst. You need to think of your approach to your website design like an end user. Are your advertising widgets relevant? Do they work with or impede the design of your website?

Advertisements will usually only be warranted if you are running a blog or personal form of business enterprise. If you are running a store, you have no need to embed advertisements, because all that will do is potentially serve to take traffic away from your website, which defeats the point in having it altogether.

Many bloggers opt instead for smoother methods of advertising. These include SEO (search engine optimization) compatibility, working with an SEO firm to help promote affiliate links and give relevant advertising results to those who are actually looking to solve a user query. This comes across as unintrusive, and even polite and helpful. If you’re using SEO, remember to keep yourself update on the happenings of Google updates, which can dramatically shift the tone of how these updates work from version to version.

To see how these updates can dramatically change your SEO considerations from version to version, check out this guide to the most recent Google SEO update, aptly named ‘Fred’ http://fatjoe.co/the-google-fred-update-what-its-targeting-and-how-to-fix-it/. This will help you stay on top of the trend and seem appealing to potential affiliate marketers.

Discussion & Comments

If you have a blog, it’s likely that you want to keep a discussion and comment box at the bottom of each article. This allows for a wide range of visitors to contribute their opinion to the articles you provide. This is invaluable in itself, as a busy comment section helps the website seem popular, and people like visiting popular websites, not least because of  the ‘authority’ and ‘community’ feelings websites like these hold.

However, you need to assess how easy to use these comment boxes are. Are you using a rudimentary form of commenting support that a visitor needs to sign up for? These can look blocky and intrusive, and people would rather just not give their opinion rather than be funneled through a difficult process to give it.

In order to counteract this, consider using a commenting hosting service like Disqus. You might have seen some of those commenting boxes around your travels of the internet. The benefits of using a platform like Disqus is that users can keep their profiles around all corners of the internet, meaning that you are provided with the information of a commenter which you can moderate with ease. It also lessens the need for that user to have to sign up to discuss topics specifically for your website. People are much more likely to comment if they have the ability to do so all ready to go from the very outset. What’s more, Disqus allows you stay on top form regarding the aesthetic and placement of it on your website.

If you’re looking for an unintrusive design, Disqus will allow you to focus your efforts on making it so by letting you edit the colors, borders, general theme, and fonts of the comment involved. You have direct creative control over this, not the user, and that can help your website seem uniform, neat and well-designed.

These tips, duly followed, should allow your website to look fantastic, and gain much more viewing traffic.