5 Web Design Tips: to design a professional website

5 hints, 5 hacks, 5 tips to make your website look like it was designed by a professional. Even if you really don't have any design skills at all. 

So let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Tip number 1: Create a color palette. 

If you are like me, colors might not exactly be your thing. I mean if someone were to tell me to come up with a color combination. I would probably come up with something like, I don't know, uh black and grey and maybe a little bit of white. Really not good with colors...

But if you want to make your website look great, using a great color combination can be a great way to do that. So how do you come up with a great color combination? even if you're not good with colors? I have found that it's extremely helpful for this, is a tool called Paletton.

It's a really simple and easy to use tool. Basically all you do is you pick a base color.  you can just choose from either a sort of adjacent colors, color scheme. And you can see the color scheme
on the right. You'll also see a triad color scheme. So it's pulling colors from different sides of the color wheel.

If you want to make additional adjustments . You can adjust the distance that it's pulling it from. So it's a great way of  quickly making a great looking color palette. And then what I like to do is, I just like to click on tables and export button. And then click on as HTML and then you can just print the html page, or actually just save the html page as a PDF.

Save it into a folder that you can use to reference whenever you need colors for my website And if you don't know what the color of something is, but say you have a logo already, and you want to use the color that's in the logo as the starting point for a color pallet. It's really easy to do on a Mac.

Let me show you how to do that. if you're on a Mac just go up to the search.  And then type in "digital color meter".  Under it settings we want to make sure that our colors are displayed as hexadecimal. So we are just going to click on view and then display values. And then make sure hexadecimal is checked.

As default it's set to decimal. So we're going to set it to hexadecimal. then we can use it to find the color of just about anything. by just Hovering over what you want to find the color of. And then you can see that you've got the hexadecimal color.

You can just take it and you can just type it in to the Paletton color palette. And there we go. Select which color palette that you think looks the best.

You can also download a google chrome extension called ColorZilla. It's really a helpful tool that you can use to pick up any color code on your browser.

Tip number 2: great looking images. 

Now this can be challenging if you don't enjoy photography, or if your not so good at taking pictures.

How do you get great pictures for your website?
Well there are two ways of doing it.

One way of doing it is to hire a photographer. If you can afford it, having custom images
for your website is a great way to make your website stand out.

Also have the images be extremely relevant to you and your business.
Now what if you don't have any money to hire a photographer, and you still want to use, and you should use, great looking images on your website.What should you do?

Well there are some great resources where you can find, either paid stock images, like iStockphoto or Shutterstock.
And then there is also some free resources that you can use, like Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay  photos.

It's a great resource for designers and anyone who needs to use great looking images.
Now be sure you check out what the rules are when you're using these images. For example some images of people that have recognizable faces.

Where you can recognize the face of the person, may have some restrictions on them. And then even inside the images there maybe some restrictions. So for example if it has an image of a Coca-Cola
logo. Or if it has a image of an iPhone or a Mac or some other recognizable piece of design, you may need to get additional rights for that.

So you just want to look into it and see what the rules are for it . You definitely want to use great looking images ...
Unsplash,  pexels and Pixabay, iStockphoto and Shutterstock are some great resources for that.

Tip number 3: spaces.

Is one that I actually struggle with all the time. It not that I forget. It's just that I don't know sometimes it seems really hard to implement this tip.

Just adding a little bit of extra space around all of the elements that you put on your website. This goes especially for text. So you want to have spaces around your heading, spaces around the body of your text. And one of the new trends in website design, and I think it's actually a really good one, is when you are making a point in text.

So if you  know writing something. Is to make your paragraphs really short. I mean your paragraph or the spacing between lines might actually just be one line. And then you are going to have spaces between those. And what that allow your viewers to do, when they are looking down your website. Is to quickly scan for the information that they are looking for.

So, adding extra spaces around all of the elements on your website, not only the text, but the images and the graphics. To allow your users to sort of see what they are, scan them, and have that space around them to draw their eye to it.

It's a really good technique. And it's one that I struggle with, but it's something that everyone should try to implement on their in their website design.

Tip number 4. Being decisive

For me that means getting rid of using sliders. so why you shouldn't use sliders? Why they're bad for SEO? and why they don't actually drive more interactions on your website?  

When you just think about it. I feel that whenever I've wanted in the past to use a slider. The real reason why I wanted to was I just couldn't decide what the most important thing was to put at the top of my website. So I just decided, I'll just put a bunch of different things and I'll just put a slider, and you know.. let people decide for themselves what the most important thing is.

The problem with that is that people don't sit around and wait for your slider to cycle through. What they do is they are pro active.You're on an interactive website. So they just start scanning down your page  and looking for what it is that they are looking for.

What I recommend doing is putting the most important thing that you have at the top of your website. And then the subsequent things that you think are less important, you can even make them look basically like slides, and put those down as then next thing to let your viewers scan down the page those what they want.

Now one problem you might have is that you just don't know what the most important this is. What the thing is that you should put at the top of your website, because you're not sure what's the most important this is for your visitors.

The best thing to do is to test. And if you're using a theme like the Divi theme, which is one of the themes that I recommend using.

They have a function for A/B split testing right inside the theme. And this allows you to test, well just about  anything, but specifically you can test the header section. And see which variation of the header section preforms the best for your audience. So you can come up with a couple of different variations and then you set a target maybe lower down on the page. Maybe it's having them scroll all the way down the page. Maybe it's having them click on a button.

Whatever the target is, what ever the action that you're trying to get them to do. You figure out which of your test subjects got them to take that interaction the best. And that's probably one of the best ways of finding out what should be at the top of your
website.

Tip number 5: Remember your mobile viewers.

Now when you're building your websites your doing it on desktop computer.  So it's really easy to forget that people might be viewing your website on tablets and mobile devices. And Google has made it abundantly clear that people use mobile devices a lot for viewing websites.

So you want to make sure that your website look great on mobile. what that means is taking just a little bit of extra time. And tweaking your designs so that you're sure that they look good on any kind of device. Any size screen that your view might be coming to.

A lot of the great WordPress page builder themes out there like the Divi theme, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, all allow you to tweak your designs specifically for mobile devices. So, something you want to do is take a little bit of extra time after you have designed your pages making sure everything looks good on mobile devices phones and tablets.

One last bonus tip  here: font combinations.

I think it's something just good to decide right when you start creating your website is font combinations. A lot of the themes out there particularly the Divi theme, and most themes out there will allow you to decide what you want your default fonts to be.

And so deciding that ahead of time can be a great way of distinguishing you website from other websites and giving it a good characteristic look.

Thanks for reading!