5 Tips for Creating a Strongly Visual Website
Thursday, February 11, 2016, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
With Pinterest rising in popularity and other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter giving photos and images more and more real estate on their sites, it’s safe to say that visual web design is here to stay.
So if you want your website to shine and really make an impression on visitors, it’s a good idea to consider a redesign that will increase its appeal to the eye.
Here are five great tips for creating a more strongly visual website.
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Responsive design is a must
First, for your website to be truly visually appealing, you need it to look right on any screen. And while in the past it might have made sense to create a separate mobile site from your desktop site, with the rise in tablets and larger-screened smartphones, really your only option now for having a website that looks great on all devices is to create one that is responsive to screen size.
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Feature large photos
Take a good, long look at the home pages for popular companies like Toms, Nike, Apple, and Levi’s. All of them welcome you with a large, striking image that expands all the way across the width of whatever screen you happen to be viewing it on.
The image, in a way, offers web users the instant gratification they are looking for while on the web. It image instantly draws the visitor in, making them want to scroll left or right to view more slides—or to scroll down to see what other striking imagery might dazzle them.
You might even consider making video the very first thing that people see when they come to your site (made possible by HTML 5, by the way.)
With the right equipment, like this type of professional shooting equipment, the video you post on your site can be just as attention grabbing as an ultra high quality photo.
This landing page style goes along with a major trend in web design today that sees websites creating block-style division with images and text, with a large image being followed by an area of whitespace and text, followed by another image, and so on.
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Be concise with text
On a similar note, the most visually appealing of websites know how to be concise with text. You won’t find large chunks of text on a striking home page but rather a large image with perhaps a single, short catchphrase overlaying it.
Sure, you can scroll down to find larger portions of text, but this text is still kept to a minimum.
What little text that you do find on home pages like these is attention grabbing, intriguing, and often even includes a call to action.
Remember: web users don’t read—they scan—so it’s important to make your site as easy to scan as possible.
This doesn’t mean that your website can’t contain large portions of text. (In fact, you still very much need well-written content to help people discover your website in the first place via a search engine, as this article details.)
But it does mean that you should keep these large amounts of text reserved for other pages on your site rather than for your front page.
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Keep it clean
Clean web design is memorable. It stands out, it’s refreshing, and it makes the visitor feel at home instantly. It’s also incredibly easy on the eyes. Here are some frequently recurring elements of clean web design:
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Plenty of whitespace (which doesn’t have to be white, necessarily)
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Simple color scheme (featuring just one or two focal colors)
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Hierarchical typography (which eliminates the need for arrows and such to create flow)
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Simple navigation (where information is clearly organized and follows common sense)
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Grid layout (where images and paragraphs are perfectly aligned, rather than “eyeballed”)
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Use color wisely
A strongly visual web design involves careful color choice. It pays attention to the different responses that color choice can provoke.
Red, for example, can stimulate hunger, while light blue gives off a more serene aura.
Due to the various connotations that colors can evoke, matching color to the overall ambiance you want to create in a website is essential.
You can also use color wisely in web design by playing with color context. When you place complementary colors like yellow and purple next to each other, for example, the result is loud and attention grabbing.
And for that reason, complementary colors might be offer just the palette you need to call attention to a subscribe or contact button.
In short, be purposeful in your color choice if you want your website to have a visual impact.
Throw us a like at Facebook.com/doable.financeThe article is written By: Maurine Dashney
