Top Web Design Tips | Level Up Your Web Design

Top Web Design Tips To Help You Level Up Your Web Design

Photos, Photos, Photos

My #1 favorite tip out of my top web design tips and upgrading any site has to do with the images that are used on said site.  Yes, you can have cool animations (which are easy to do in most cases), but if you don’t have awesome images, you will fail.

Videos are actually even more of a big deal, but those can be expensive to make (and look good). So I’m going with photos right now as the cheaper and easier route to show you how you can upgrade your site rapidly.

It’s pretty amazing what a few images will do to upgrade the feel of a site.

Before & Afters

Below are some examples of before and afters. Starting with Apple. Now I know there are large gaps in time between these two before and afters. There were also limitations on what you could do layout-wise.   But I want to illustrate how big of an impact having professional, updated images on your site. This will enhance the look and feel of your site easily.

What I love about this comparison is that Apple’s layout is almost the same since the beginning. The one thing that has definitely changed, is the photos/photography and some other design elements. Obviously, those devices weren’t around to take such good photos, but again the point is they are using powerful images. For people back in the late 90s early 2000s, seeing that first example probably was blown away.

Either way, images totally change the game for your website.

Here’s another example to further illustrate my top web design tips. This is of a client’s before & after, of which I did the after site:

As you can see the before is pretty basic. It has its key elements like a contact form and plenty of content. But which looks cleaner? The before or the after? The actual page of the real site is much longer, but I wanted to show the above snippets for a good comparison. Here are some key points:

• The images are all updated and crisp. Yes, they are stock images in this specific example. But there are good examples of stock images and really really bad examples of ones. Stick with the good.
• White space is your friend, for clean modern sites. It doesn’t have to be white. Your site can be all black or all pink. But spacing is key and visually pleasing.
• Use of the logo. They got a beautiful logo created as part of their upgrade, and it was incorporated into their site heavily. Logos don’t have to sit only in your navigation and footer. Have fun with placing it around the site. Especially when you have a nicely updated logo, it will look really nice.
• Content is still very important. Your designs can’t get in the way of the needed content for SEO and whatnot. But you can space out your page enough to get it all in there and still be visually pleasing. The old site above had all its content crammed right in the front.
• Branding colors. This client got a specific branding color package, from which there were four color options to choose from.  Only two colors got used heavily: gold and green. It’s important to have brand colors that you stick around with. That way, when your public starts seeing your site, they know what to expect colorwise. It’s not all over the map basically.

A picture is worth a thousand words

The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” holds true with this rule. You can communicate so much more with an image. You can also communicate so much right away than you can with 1000s of words on a homepage, blog post, or any content.

So, photos, photos, photos!

I hope you enjoyed this blog about my top web design tips! Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and if this helped you at all in your marketing efforts. And feel free to check out our other design blogs and our marketing blogs, thank you!