If you want a website for your business you can be proud of, you need to have the best overall design that suits it. Many people will choose a WordPress template that is pre-made in the hopes that it will save them time and money. Many times, if you want your website done properly, this won’t be the case. Many templates can introduce their own restrictions, bad code, and a variety of other things that typically will take more time and money to resolve than is worth it. They can provide great inspiration and guidance for design, but they’re not always the best, cheapest, or most efficient solution.
Tip 1: Knowing Your Own Business
What kind of business do you run daily? Does it offer services from business to business (B2B)? Do you have a lot of products to sell? Is it more of a personal blog than a website? Are you looking to use your site like you would a professional portfolio, or do you run an online magazine?
Answering all of this will determine how your design will best suit your business. However, this is only the first step forward. Don’t settle for a site that you think looks pretty; there’s more to getting the best website than that.
Tip 2: Know Your Plugins
Plugins are another reason why we suggest you go with a website built from the ground up instead of picking a pre-made template that potentially has bad or broken coding included or depends on specific or outdated plugins to function properly. You will not get as many plugins if you were to choose a free-to-use website, nor would you have the option of applying many changes if you decided to redo aspects of it. Plus. if the broken coding is included, you’d spend more time and money than it’s worth to customize it yourself.
You will also need to know which plugins are worth your while and which ones are best avoided for the sake of your site’s security. Our previous post covers the best WordPress plugins for websites, but for greater results you should not settle for free-to-use sites for this reason.
Tip 3: Colours & Fonts Matter, But More So the Experience
Colours and fonts are indeed something to look for in a new website. No one will be happy trying to read hard-to-read font or feel good about visiting a site with clashing colours.
However, visuals are only one part of the whole picture of why a website’s overall design can be hit or miss. A great-looking website may load slower than you’d like because there is so much visual coding needed. Likewise, a cheaper site may not be SEO-friendly or customizable enough should you wish to add or remove anything from the site.
What you should look for is a design that has the customer in mind. It’s the overall experience of visiting a website that can impact how many people would want to visit. How would you feel having to click through so many pages to find what you’re looking for, all while the page loads slowly—the cherry on top being that it’s ugly to look at for too long? You’d feel terrible, of course! So go for a site design that makes you feel the opposite of what this scenario illustrates: a smooth, fast, and even pleasant experience of finding what you’re looking for.
Tip 4: Hire Us to Build the Website
Yes, we’re serious. While there are a lot of cool website themes and design templates to check out, you need to realize that there’s a lot more to creating a site that looks good and works properly. And as always, keep in mind that if you use something like WiX, Squarespace, or even WordPress.com for your site, you probably don’t own the site and can’t move it if you have issues with the hosting. It belongs to the company you bought it from instead. If you’re serious about your business—and if you’ve read up to this point, we know you are—then the best thing is to get a website you can both be proud of and that you personally own. There wouldn’t be any need to worry about getting in touch with support if something goes wrong, and you can return to work knowing that your site is in good hands. Choosing a website’s design is one thing, but if you want the best website using top-of-the-line software (in our case, we use the Divi Builder and WordPress for developing sites from the ground up), hiring us is the way to go.
Now that you’ve got an idea of how you want your website to look and feel, let us know! Give us a call and we can build the entire website for you so you can focus and worry less about how it’s functioning and get back to running your business. If you’ve got a design in mind but aren’t sure it’s the right fit, show us during a one-on-one consultation. You pick the website, we’ll help buy you the drink or snacks and come directly to you if need be!