With a team of expert full-stack web developers, the conversation at Rise Local tends to gravitate towards responsive web design, web development, and technical SEO. However, that’s far from all we’re capable of and we even have a team of creative graphic designers that help us come up with one-of-a-kind responsive website designs. Today, let’s get into some of their hot tips for creating a stunning website.
Simple Layouts Are Better
All of our sites use simple layouts. This helps people visiting your website focus on what you’re saying and keeps your website loading quickly. But a simple website doesn’t have to be boring. Our Dallas graphic design team can make custom icons or source stock ones depending on your budget. The content creation team will also make sure you have crisp and vibrant photos to show off what you’re offering and present the members of your staff in their best light.
Fonts Say A Lot About You
The typeface you use is essential to your company’s branding on and offline. A generic serif or sanserif font isn’t going to get the job done. When you’re choosing the font for your company’s website, you first need to make sure it’s easy to read. Next, you should make sure it fits your brand. If you have a wedding venue, you may want an elegant script or dainty handwriting to highlight important information. Meanwhile, a construction company might opt for a bold, masculine font and a clean sans serif font for the body text. Whatever font you choose should appeal to your target market and represent your company.
Content Needs Creative
Rise Local is first and foremost an SEO company. This means that content is essential to the success of most of our marketing efforts. However, too much dense text can be offputting to readers (even though search engines love it), which is why it’s important to incorporate photos, graphics, and pull quotes to break it up. Graphics don’t have to just take up space though. An important part of web design is ensuring that every website element serves a purpose. You can include snappy infographics and product breakdowns that make it easy for the skimmers to get the information they need and entice them to dig deeper.
Don’t Forget the Negative Space
While most responsive web design experts would advocate for some creative elements, it’s important not to neglect negative space. Whitespace helps guide people through your website, increases readability, and declutters the area making it easy to pick out important information.
Colors Have Meaning
The color palette you choose for your brand because it plays a large role in how you’re perceived by the public. A bright red might inspire passion, a sleek black illustrates something that’s expensive or luxurious, and a lovely green might imply that your brand is natural or sustainable. All of these colors elicit gut reactions that draw people to your company. However, a poor color palette could also disgust and repel customers. A muddy brown, vomit green, or Pepto Bismol pink have negative connotations and make people less likely to give you a chance.
When you’re picking your brand’s colors, look into color psychology and ensure the colors you’ve landed on are sending the right message. Then, double-check that the shade will actually be pleasing to those who look at it.
Get Rid of Stock Images!
People want to see crisp, clear, and vibrant photos that show them exactly what they’re going to get when they shop with you. They also want authenticity. Hire a professional photographer or work with one of our brand photographers to capture your value. We guarantee that your customers would rather see pictures of you at work than a stock image with your logo superimposed over it.
Perfect Your Brand Messaging
While repetition is a well-known and highly valued design principle, it’s not so great for copy. Yes, you need to use your keywords multiple times. However, repeating the same (unsearched) phrase over and over again doesn’t look good or provide an SEO benefit. Our copywriters can help get you on track, but if you’re writing your own copy, think about all of the different ways you can illustrate one concept and then use them! This will help even more people find and enjoy your business’ website.
When developing your style and an editorial guide, you should also consider how you would talk to a customer. This will help us create more engaging content for your website rather than just publishing cut and dry information with no flavor.
Make Your Website Interactive
There are so many great ways to engage your customers and keep them on your website longer. You just need to implement an interactive web design. Try quizzes (Buzzfeed is popular for a reason), a 24/7 chat feature, or interactive animations to delight viewers. It’s important not to add too many plug-ins or your website won’t function properly, but one or two carefully selected features will improve your engagement and conversion rates.
Break the Status Quo
Small elements can be changed to fit your brand better. Instead of a plain cursor or pointer, get creative! If you’re an electrician, consider having a dark theme on your website, but when you hover over something on the website it looks like it’s being illuminated by a flashlight. If your school district is fundraising for a new building, include an interactive graphic showing what amenities it will have and include a short description. Find creative ways to excite people about information that may otherwise bore them or that could be hard to wrap their heads around.
Dallas Responsive Web Design
Here at Rise Local, we specialize in responsive website design so your site will display beautifully on any device. Better yet, we’re fast. When you enlist the help our top web designers, your new site will be ready to launch in two weeks. Our sites are also built to perform so you’ll see improvements right out of the gate. Then, we can get you started with SEO so you don’t lose momentum and start seeing an uptick in qualified sales leads in just a few months. If you’re curious about how our team can support you, contact us for a free consultation.