25
Jul
2010
Website Design Tips – Tips To Making A Site Look Professional
There are no tremendous secrets to making a web site look professional, you just need to look at the result and make certain that you keep on track. Here are my favourite secret hints to follow!
Do not make it too personal! – Unless you are selling yourself as a person, for example a children’s entertainer, then do not put loads of personality into the website. Too often I hear from my sales team that a customer would like a bit of this in and a bit of that. Yes, they make the sites look very personalised, but too often these take away from the professional look.
Reduce the design team – One of the biggest causes of a web site going from a professional look to a amateur look is when too many people are involved in the design. If they all read and obeyed the rest of the hints, then this would not be a problem. But at every person’s review they each want to put their mark on a web site and suddenly all manner of tweaks and extras are being added. Cramming all of these banners, dancing cows, splashes of colour and more onto the page that every single one of the committee have added soon destroys the look.
Watch the font size – The tiniest reduction of font sizes is sometimes all that is needed to take a site from looking home built to a professional looking website. Use relative font sizes (measured in em) rather than actual font sizes and if the visitor needs larger text they might click a button in their browser to increase it. But large font sizes that shout out to the visitor do not look professional. Sadly, quite often that means the default font size (especially in Arial font) does not look good.
Don’t get carried away with colours – It may be clever to add in loads of blocks of different colours, but it does not look wonderful. Keep to several straightforward looking colour blocks nicely positioned around the page.
Use professional images – Sorry, but snaps taken on the camera of your mobile phone may look good, but buying several images from a top quality stock photography directory (I use iStockPhoto) gives such an outstanding finish to the site that it is well worth the small amount that you pay.
Don’t think movement is a good thing – A lot of movement is never good, not on a site. One or two small, smooth flash animations might add to the page, such as on the header, but placing heaps of clever banners, snowflakes falling down the screen, light bulbs that glow and fade and so on will practically always look tacky.
In short, to make a web site look professional try to not be too clever. Only because you have learnt how to add a scrolling image does not mean you have to. Use clever tricks merely when without doubt needed and do not try to show off with tricks. Your web site design will do the showing off for you.
Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a web design Merseyside service. For more useful tips about good web design call into the blog.
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