Web design is kind of like your site’s wardrobe and how you present your site/business to anyone who is visiting your site, and it could always use a little improving. This isn’t to say your wardrobe isn’t pretty kickass already (really, you look great), but let’s face it: Everyone has some desire to improve their outward appearance. By updating your web design, you can effectively connect better with your visitors, and ultimately take your part in making the Internet a better place. With this in mind, following are five tips to improve your web design.
Don’t be Afraid to Experiment
Things are always changing when it comes to web design. Different layouts, typefaces and interfaces are being experimented with every day by myriad different websites, so why shouldn’t you try to make your site stand out from the rest as well?
At root, innovation is the key to progress, pushing the boundaries of all areas of life, and web design is no exception. Next time you’re reflecting on your current site design, a radical reform of what you already have is worth considering. Start by identifying the weak points of your current site, and then analyze how your organizational structure may fit with different layouts, keeping in mind new methods you could employ to better communicate the most important information on your site.
Consider Investing in Templates or Instructional Videos
If you’ve really exhausted your creative potential or you just feel like seeing what the paid market has to offer, you can always choose to go the route of paid templates or instructional videos. In most cases, websites will try anything to get a free template for their site’s design. While a free template may be a perfectly fine route to take, chances are that a paid template would prove to be the wisest investment when it comes to visitor connection. Further, instructional video services like those on www.lynda.com can increase your overall knowledge of web design and ultimately improve your site.
Explore Successful Sites
One good thing about design is that there are a lot of people who can do it really well by intuition, so there are a lot of people from whom we can learn from. In the spirit of such artistic inspiration, you may want to consider checking out some remarkably successful site designs, such as those documented on the hundreds of design blogs throughout the Internet. It may be worth your while just to spend a couple hours searching through design blogs, trying to find something that sparks your imagination.
Consider Consulting Social Media
When all else fails, remember that there is an immense web design community on social media, and by reaching out to some different web designers, you may be able to glean some helpful tips for your own website’s design. For this, simply Tweet at, Facebook message, or use any other social media platform to contact a sort of ‘public designer’, or a designer who crafts their own brand very closely online in an attempt to gain work/publicity. You can send them a URL to your site with some design questions you may have and chances are, they’ll jump at the opportunity to help someone who could end up spreading their reputation across the web.
Employ a User-based Perspective
Perhaps this one goes without saying, but it’s important to remember that not every web designer attended design school and was instilled with the fundamental principles of design. Simply put, designers should always try to see things from the user (or customer) perspective. By designing something, you’re essentially just optimizing it to be the user-friendliest it can be and in order to do that, you must approach the thing you’re designing from the perspective of your audience.
SamuelOtt
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- 5 Tips to Improve Your Web Design - January 4, 2014