Great design doesn’t have an industry

Your website design speaks volumes about your business, no matter the business you are in. Unfortunately, I think this message is getting lost. I have had more conversations than I can count that end with “I don’t need a high end site design, people in my industry don’t care what my site looks like.”

This just isn’t true!

I’ve talked before about what makes a good blog design, since this is the type of design I offer most often. But, most of the ideas in the post hold true for all design types. No matter the industry, your website is the one of the first things that a potential client sees. More people than ever are going online to research companies before working with them – and whether you want to believe it, the minute they hit your site, they start to judge you. Your website needs to be clean, well put together, easy to use, and for lack of a better term – glamorous! When potential clients visit your site, you want them to want to stay and look around. You want them to read more, check out more, and learn more. But if your site is hard to use, doesn’t look appealing and isn’t welcoming, they won’t stay long.

Whether you are involved with furniture, finance or film, your site needs to show that you know what your doing.

Luckily, there are a 3 easy ways to make sure that your site looks and feels more professional:

1. Make sure that your colors work together. Tools like Kuler from adobe (free!), allow you to enter one color and it gives you other colors in that color palette. You can also use an image to create an entire palette from, which protects you from choosing clashing colors.
2. Choose fonts that are easy to read and look professional. The cleaner the font, the easier it is to read and the more professional it looks. While I am a proponent for a ‘fun’ font mixed in, the main writing on your font should be classic. And please, whatever you do, avoid Comic Sans and Papyrus!
3. Leave lots of white space. White space refers to the the blank (called white but is whatever color your background is) area between paragraphs, lines or images. White space is what opens up a page, makes it easy to read, and eliminates the feeling of being overcrowded. Simply put, white space is your friend.

Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Contemplating a site re-design
2. Take your blog to the next level: 5 design tips
3. 5 elements every blog design needs to have