Considering the speed that the web is progressing, it’s no surprise if your business’s website design feels a little tired, even if its only a few months old. If you’re not ready for a complete overhaul, though, there are a few ways to freshen up your look and increase your website’s effectiveness with minimal changes. Here’s a few ideas, plus resources to get you started!
Get new buttons
Especially for your call-to-action! A shiny new button will draw the attention of first-time visitors, and also repeat visitors who’ve trained their eyes to gloss over your action buttons. Freepik.com has tons of free vector button files you can download and pull right into Photoshop. Just add text. By People has a fantastic and free vector image pack that includes 70 buttons and 50 social media icons, not to mention shadows, background, menus and much much more. Almost everything is also a .psd, so it can easily be edited or added to in Photoshop.
Add new photos
Has the same stock photo of a smiling woman been on your front page for a year? It’s definitely time for a change. Just be sure to find a legal image. Check out our blogpost, 5 Free Web Image Resources, for our top sites to find free photos. However for your most prominent website photos, it might be worth it to go ahead and pay top dollar for a great image from iStockPhoto.
Change colors
A fresh color palette could be just the ticket to take your website from humdrum to hot. We’ve got 6 Tools for Choosing Your Website’s Color Scheme, but our favorite is definitely the Kuler Palette Creator from Adobe.
If you’re stuck with your branded color palette, try adding in another color or playing with the saturation of your existing colors to give your site a makeover. Or try adding a few striking images that are within your color palette! Find them with the TinEye Labs Multicolor Search Tool.
Simplify
Is there a lot going on your website? Try utilizing the 80-20 rule: typically in web design, 20% of the content is providing 80% of the value. For example on a restaurant website, the most valuable 20% is probably their menu, phone number, hours, and location. What do you do with the other 80%? Pare it down as much as possible, and make sure all of it plays second fiddle to the most important 20%. If your website features a call-to-action, reducing the noise on your site will hopefully lead to less distraction and more conversions!
Get more above the fold
If you’ve already simplified, you should have an easier time with this one since you’ve got less content in the first place! Move around your elements so that your most important content (especially your call-to-action/phone number) are above the fold. Try shortening your header or removing extraneous images.
Simple changes can really go a long way to make your website more appealing to your visitors and get them to keep coming back. Just remember when you’re swapping images and buttons and adding colors that the most important thing is your message, so don’t clutter it!
You’ve probably poured a lot of resources into your website to make the interface user-friendly and the design look great, but you may have neglected some of the more subtle aspects of your website. Especially if your website is your storefront (and isn’t that more or less the case for all of us these days?), it’s worth going the extra mile to ensure your potential customers have the best experience possible.