The primary purpose of a website is to drive traffic relevant to your product or services and engage them. You may have top-quality content but if your design is an eyesore, people will leave your website in no time. Learning how to make your website visually appealing can boost your conversion rates.
By making your website have a solid structure, captivating visuals, smooth functionality, and legible text, you can make it look easy in the eyes of your visitors, thus encouraging them to stay on your domain longer, consume more resources, and convert into customers at a better rate.
Here are 11 things you must consider to make your website visually appealing:
1. Choose Your Theme Carefully
Your WordPress theme determines what your website looks like and what you can do with it. No amount of technical expertise or design knowledge can compensate for a poor theme. This is because the theme is the core backend code of your website, and if that is patchy, you will have difficulty bringing ideas to life.
For a good design, you might find the need to use some plugins. All plugins are essentially chunks of code. They interact with the existing code of your theme; a good theme accommodates design plugins seamlessly. This way, you can experiment with design ideas without worrying about your page breaking or slow load speed.
Also, quality themes come with an arsenal of inbuilt design capabilities. They allow you to add animation, select different types of blocks to give a certain look and feel to your webpages, have a template for header menu, all without having to write a single line of code!
To pick the right theme, shortlist some websites with good design that matches your vision. Then, find what theme they use with this tool.
2. Frame a Functional Layout
The way you arrange visual elements in your page layout. For example, the navigation menu, footer, sidebar, search boxes, Social Media share icons, etc, are placed at specific coordinates on the page because people expect to see them there. This arrangement is called page layout.
A clean layout with ample white space is what you must aim for. This allows users to find elements that you want them to find. For example, you can consider coloring your CTA buttons differently to make them stand out from the rest of the page.
Though most WordPress themes come with a default layout, feel free to play around with the placement of elements.
3. Add a Logo and Favicon
Logos and Favicons not just enhance your brand but also make your website visually appealing. They also provide you with a range of colors to choose from for your future design needs.
Make sure your logo aligns with your website niche. And even though Favicons are tiny, they can add a new flavor to your web pages.
You can easily create your logo and favicon on Canva.
4. Play with Colors
Colors evoke emotions and emotions make your website visually appealing. People associate different colors with different emotions. It is helpful if you use colors that align with your brand’s emotions.
For example, if you sell baby products, use white colors as it evokes feelings of innocence and trust. Try to use your brand colors in your logo and integrate them into your images too.
You can also use those colors as the background of your web pages instead of a plain white set-up.
But make sure you use colors sparingly. The intent is to make your website look aesthetic, not gaudy.
5. Include Images
You must use images to break the monotony of text, further the narrative, explain your offering better, make your website visually appealing, and for SEO benefits. In 2021, it is an absolute requirement. And with so many free tools and ready-to-use stock images at your disposal, you have no excuse to not use images.
Images add texture to your web pages. A well-designed image, placed at the right section can keep your readers attention for longer, purely because it is aesthetic to look at.
You can use Canva to design images. Alternatively, you can download free stock images from Unsplash, Pexels, etc.
6. Responsiveness
Responsiveness of a website is the measure of its adaptability to different screen sizes. As per a survey, almost 50% of all web traffic is mobile! If your website is not responsive, you are essentially eliminating half your audience.
Most popular WordPress themes are responsive. But it is easy to forget about the mobile audience when you create all your content on a laptop.
You want to be conscious about how your content looks on mobile. Sure, the theme takes care of text alignment, but what about images? Are they too big for mobile? Do your Ads cover text? Are your CTA buttons too big for small screens? Is the font size too small or too big for mobile?
There are many things that can go wrong on mobile screens but you can fix that through visual examination. After publishing a page, take a quick look at the mobile version. You will easily find elements that either need to be optimized for mobile or removed altogether.
Remember, WordPress themes give you an option to remove a content piece from one screen size while rendering it on another. Make use of that feature to make a clean mobile domain. This way you make your website visually appealing for your small screen audiences.
7. Design a Helpful Header Menu
The header menu is the element that stands out on your web pages. You want to make it visually appealing by using your brand colors and contrast with the text.
Your header menu should have a navigation section that is designed to take visitors to different pages of your website. However, the navigation dropdowns should not cover the whole screen because it makes for a poor user experience.
Also, your header can also include your website logo, a search bar, and social media icons if that’s your style.
8. Frame a Functional Website Footer
Your visitors reach the website footer after they scroll right to the end of the page. This makes the footer your final chance to keep your audience and divert them to more useful content. The more visually appealing your website footer is, the better the chances that they will click on one of your footer links.
Make sure your footer is in-line with your website design and has information relevant to your business. You can add your contact information, links to useful content, Google Maps location, etc.
9. Find the Best Font
The text takes up the most screen space. Thus, you want it to be as easy on the eyes and visually appealing as possible.
Depending on your niche, you can pick fancy fonts but that is not advisable because those fonts are not easy to read. Go for fonts that are not cursive in style. A simple font adds to your website aesthetics.
Also, please focus on your font sizes. You don’t want them to be too big, but you don’t even want your visitors to peek close to the screen to read the text. Make your font size optimal and that goes for your Title and Header tags too.
You must also check how the font renders on mobile screens.
10. Refine Readability
No one wants to read thick chunks of text no matter how helpful the content is. Your content must include ample white space to let users focus on the text. Using white space limits the area that eyes need to scan thus increasing focus. Plus, white space makes your content look clean and visually appealing.
Also, consider employing Header tags in your content. Header tags split your content into sections. Users can jump to the next section if they find one boring. In addition, if you embolden text tactfully, you can further guide your readers to a different paragraph if the one they’re reading is not relevant to them.
Essentially, you are guiding your readers to the end of the page by making your content easy on the eyes.
11. Create Clear CTAs
A Call-to-Action or CTA is what drives people to take any action that you want them to take. For example, you may want them to subscribe to your newsletter, buy your product, download a document, etc. All these are CTA.
You want your CTAs to stand out. You can do that by using slightly different colors to enhance your CTA section or adding animation to it.
But make sure your copy for CTAs is enticing and tells your audience what to expect after clicking on it.
Conclusion
Making your website visually appealing is quintessential to its success. With cutting-edge tools like WordPress, Canva, etc, you can create aesthetic websites that capture your visitors’ attention, keep them on the domain for longer, and increase conversions.
In this blog post, we covered 11 tips to make your website visually appealing for your audience. Implement our suggestions and see how it goes for you.
Which tip did you like the most?
