It seems like everyone has a website today. Whether it’s for business, a charity or merely a hobby, thousands of people create and maintain websites every day. Standing out in the crowd and making an impact on your visitors is incredibly important to making your website as successful as possible. Learning how to make a website great is a combination of style, caring, content, staying updated on current innovations in web design and functionality and your own style. These tips will help you not only create a great website but allow it to only get better as time goes on.
1. Stylish and Clean Logo
Whether your website is for a business or not, an eye-catching and memorable logo can be invaluable. This is also where your creativity can really shine. Think of a few elements of your website and think of one or two items, actions or animals that encompass these elements. Implement these in a few different logo mock-ups to get a good idea of what you want in your logo.
It’s best to keep the amount of different subjects in a logo under three as any more than that may make the logo seem cluttered or busy. A good logo has a clear focus and message.
Ensure that the colours pop from the page and grab the viewer’s attention without being distracting. The colour scheme for your logo should complement the colour scheme of the overall website.
The art should be crisp, smooth and clean, and it’s a good idea to have the logo designed in vector format. Vectors allow an image to be blown up or shrunk to essentially any size without losing any quality.
2. Make Your Website Responsive
Browsing the Internet on your smartphone or tablet has become incredibly popular in recent years, and it’s likely only going to get more popular as time goes on. Learning how to make a website responsive to mobile browsers is very important to ensuring that your visitors have a great time using your website no matter what platform they’re using.
The layout itself is only a part of what you’ll need to cover in making a website run as smoothly on a smartphone or tablet as it does on a PC. You’ll also need to check if links, pictures, videos, store functionality and every other aspect of your website work well on mobile devices. If it’s not done thoroughly, mobile users might end up getting more frustrated with your website than if it wasn’t altered for responsiveness at all.
3. Implement HTML5 instead of Flash
Flash is quickly dying off as a preferred plug-in for animations and videos on websites. This is both due to the fact that Flash still continues to have stability issues and the ongoing problems between Adobe, the developers of Flash, and Apple. HTML5 is gaining popularity as a new and better alternative to Flash. It is very stable, doesn’t require a plug-in to function, works well on many mobile devices and even allows you to embed text in your videos that works well with SEO.
4. Utilize the Power of Social Media
Being active on the most popular social media sites is not only the trendy thing to do, but it’s also very beneficial to your website’s success. Social media use has exploded in popularity in recent years, and people love to share their favourite websites and specific web pages with their friends and family. If you make interesting content, people will be looking for ways to share it on their favourite social media websites, and if you’re without those sharing buttons at the top or bottom of the page you’ll be missing out on valuable exposure and possibly disappointing visitors.
Integrating social media sharing buttons in your website only does so much. Being active on your own social media pages will create even more exposure and improve a visitor’s experience with an open channel of communication.
5. Add and Maintain a Blog
Blogging is another great way to improve communication with your visitors and make them feel welcome as well as updated on your current activities. For businesses, a blog allows you to keep your customers updated on upcoming sales, changes to the website or store, events, exclusive deals, new products or services and more. For the more casual website owner, you can update your visitors with future plans for content, expected down times in activity, contests, shout outs, personal messages and more.
However, merely creating a blog is not good enough. You also need to ensure that you regularly update the blog whenever you can. While it may not seem like a big deal to have a seldom updated blog on your website, it can send a bad message. It makes it seem like you might not care about your visitors enough to update them on news related to the website. You could mislead people into believing overall activity for the website is very slow or even halted entirely. Additionally, it could make a business look small or even closed down for good. Even if you don’t have much to say, it’s still a good idea to maintain a steady stream of posts in your blog once a week or two to keep regular visitors caught up and to give off a better first impression to new visitors.
Conclusion
Knowing how to make a website is simple enough, especially with the numerous tools available to us today. However, with these tips in mind and the spirit of your ideas and goals behind the design, you’ll be sure to make a fantastic website that anyone would enjoy using.
