A professional-looking site is one that reflects who your target audience is, speaks directly to their needs and goals, and explains how you can help them. It also has calls to action that are clearly positioned on each page and optimized for search engines.
Using high-quality visuals, keeping your text short, a clean design and layout, a proper permalink structure, aesthetic consistency, white space, and quality content can all make a big difference.
1. Use a Clean Theme
Clean themes are the perfect choice for businesses looking to create a professional-looking site. They are visually appealing and help to draw attention to the most important information on your website. In addition, clean designs are more memorable and will leave a lasting impression on visitors.
2. Keep it Simple
While it’s important to have a well-planned site and design that reflects your business and brand, it’s also important to keep things simple. Simple doesn’t mean minimalist or boring, but it does mean removing decorative elements that don’t serve a purpose and keeping the lines of code as short as possible.
This can be as simple as removing image borders, limiting the number of stylesheets, reducing the number of JavaScript effects and using a simple color palette. It’s also a good idea to limit the number of images on a page to avoid overdoing it.
This way, your site will load faster and be less likely to have errors that could cause visitors to leave. Having a simple, clean layout is the best way to engage visitors and ensure that they stay on your site. This is particularly important for businesses like riding schools that rely on first impressions and website traffic to book lessons and appointments.
3. Add Some Flair
If your site is cluttered with too much visual stuff, it will look unprofessional. Keeping your site clean and organized will convey that sense of professionalism.
To make your site more professional, focus on creating a brand identity that inspires trust and is easy to remember. It should also reflect your company’s unique personality.
Adding flair to your site is another great way to make it more professional. Flair is an image that summarizes your accomplishments on the Stack Exchange network (your reputation, badges, and the top sites you’ve participated in). It can be used as a tool to show off your expertise on a particular subject matter.
You can add a variety of different flairs to your site. However, you should always be aware of the impact that they might have on other users. For example, some users may be allergic to certain colors and you should take them into consideration.
4. Make it Responsive
Research has shown that 75% of web credibility comes from how your site looks. This goes beyond just visuals; you have to be able to adjust for the different screen sizes of desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile (which has many different screen dimensions too).
Conventional websites that don’t use responsive design end up looking cluttered on smaller screens. Using a technique called media query, CSS can tell the website to adjust its layout based on the user’s screen size and resolution.
For example, a full-width image will automatically appear on larger screens while being hidden on smaller ones. The website will also change its layout and content to better display on a smaller screen. This can include condensing menu items into a single button that can be accessed on a small screen. The result is a professional-looking and usable site.
5. Make it Mobile-Friendly
Mobile-friendly websites are becoming more and more important as more people use smartphones to access the internet. Google has even started requiring that sites be mobile-friendly in order to rank well on search results.
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly by ensuring that all of your links and buttons are large enough to be clicked on with thumbs and are sufficiently spaced apart so that users won’t accidentally click on the wrong link. Also, avoid using fonts that are difficult to read on mobile devices.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it may look unprofessional and can negatively impact your credibility. To avoid this, consider hiring a web designer like San Diego Web Design who can create a mobile version of your site or a content management system that is responsive to mobile devices. This will ensure that your site looks great on all devices.
6. Make it Easy to Use
When a site is cluttered with too many colors, images or fonts, it’s hard to work out how to navigate it. This makes it feel unprofessional and confusing for visitors.
While your logo, branding and colours might be the first things that come to mind when creating your site, your fonts play an important role too. The best fonts are ones that help your site to work, not just look good. Avoid fonts that are difficult to read on screens, like script and hand-written styles.
A professional-looking site is one that is easy for all visitors to use, regardless of whether they have a visual impairment or audio issues. Using tools like Hotjar and Smartlook to test your site can help you see how user-friendly it is. This is essential when making decisions about how to structure your site.
7. Make it Easy to Find
A great site shows the world who you are, makes people remember you, and helps them find what they’re looking for. It’s also easy to navigate, mobile friendly, has impressive content, and is SEO optimized.
Imagery is important in making a website professional, but the images you choose should be high quality and relevant to your business. Blurry or irrelevant images can make a site seem amateurish, as can an overreliance on stock photos.
The copy on a site is just as important as the layout and imagery, and it should be concise, clear, and powerful. When copy doesn’t meet these standards, it can scream “amateur.” Invest in a professional writing team to ensure that your site copy is effective and compelling. They’ll also help you find the right words to tell your unique story. Your audience will thank you.
8. Make it Easy to Read
A website needs to be easy to read in order to look professional. This means that your text should be easy on the eyes, and it should be clear where to find important information. You should also use white space effectively to help make your site look less crowded.
It’s also important to keep your line lengths short. Long paragraphs of text can be difficult to read, and they will decrease the likelihood that visitors will consume your content.
Finally, you should also be mindful of your font selection. Fonts are often overlooked, but they can make a big difference in how your site looks and feels. Avoid fonts that are hard on the eyes, and use high contrast so that your text stands out against your background. You should also avoid using low-contrast text colors like pale gray on a dark background.
9. Make it Easy to Navigate
Keeping your site easy to navigate for both search engines and visitors is a big part of creating a professional-looking website. When a website is difficult to navigate, it frustrates users and they are likely to leave the site quickly.
Keep your navigation menu at the top of pages – it is where most people expect to find it. Use dropdown menus under each of your top-level tabs for clean, organized navigation.
Make sure all navigational link titles accurately portray what the user will find when they click on them – nothing frustrates visitors more than clicking on a navigation link that leads to nowhere! Make sure to also avoid using icons in your navigation links – this makes them more difficult to read for visitors and is bad for SEO. Text is always the best choice for navigating your site.
10. Make it Easy to Contact You
Having your contact information easily accessible will help users trust and engage with your business. It also helps to increase your leads and sales. This can be done by placing your contact page in an easy-to-find place such as your navigation bar or footer of each site page.
It’s important to have your contact information readily available, as it shows you care about your customers and want them to be able to get in touch with you if they need to. However, don’t overload your contact page with fields that aren’t necessary for each individual inquiry.
