As the owner of a website, you have the final say on its appearance. You can make it look as simple or as elaborate as you’d like.

Whichever way you go, you need to keep in mind that your website has to look and feel professional in every respect. After all, your website is the face of your business online, and it should make a good impression on your customers and business partners alike at all times.

Your web design plays a crucial role in giving your site a professional look. Here are some web design tips that will help you get a more professional-looking website.

Make Navigation Easier

When users take multiple clicks to get to the content they want from your site, you are, in effect, wasting a considerable chunk of their time, and that’s the height of unprofessionalism. It should only take users a click or two to reach the desired page.

For a more professional website, you might want to add more clickable navigation elements, a search feature that actually works, and clearly defined categories. Some internal linking will do wonders for your navigation as well.

Go For A Simpler Web Design

As mentioned above, you can make your website look as straightforward or as intricate as you want. However, achieving a professional look for your website is more easily done if you keep things simple. Elaborate graphics and eye-popping design elements are great, but a more streamlined web design makes for a more professional-looking website.

A simpler web design also allows your site to have more whitespace, which not only makes your pages look more balanced and sophisticated but also gives your content extra breathing room.

Improve Readability

With the breathing room having more whitespace gives your content, everything becomes easier to read. Then again, you can do more to make your site more readable.

Avoid using light-colored fonts on a white background. When there’s a considerable contrast between the text and the background, your content will be much easier to read.

Considering how many Internet users scan web content more than they read it, using bigger fonts for your content can make scanning easier for them. For the body text, a 16pt font should be big enough. Naturally, headings and subheadings should use bigger typefaces.

It’s also important to avoid using lots of font types for your website. Readability is better if you keep it to a maximum of three types of font.

Use Colors Smartly

Ideally, the color scheme for your website should have one dominant color as your brand color, and one or two more colors as an accent color.

One thing you have to make sure of is that your color choices should blend well not only with each other but with the overall look of your web design as well. A website with clashing colors is definitely not the average Internet user’s idea of a professional-looking site.

Make Your Pages Load Faster

Customers and potential business partners will be more impressed with your website—and your business—if any page they try to access doesn’t take more than three seconds to load. Anything longer than that will be considered slow. Making people wait is very unprofessional, and you wouldn’t want your website to do that to people who matter to your business.

Some of the things you can do to your web design to speed up your site include optimizing images and minimizing or even avoiding the use of custom fonts. You can also minify your code and reduce redirects to make your pages load faster.

Use High-Quality Photos

Few things can make your website look more professional as easily as high-quality photographs can. Stunning photos take people’s breath away, especially when they’re original ones taken by a professional photographer and not from a stock photo provider.

Switch To A Mobile-Friendly Web Design

When you consider that mobile users have long outnumbered desktop users, your website needs to display well on smartphones and tablets.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, then you cannot expect to impress mobile users because their browsing experience won’t likely be that great. After all, websites that are not mobile-friendly don’t look good on small screens. Navigating it will also be quite cumbersome, among other things.

In all likelihood, mobile users who access your non-mobile-friendly website on their devices will simply move on to another site right away.

Switch to a responsive design, and you will see how professional your website will look when opened on tablets and smartphones.

If you know enough about web design, then go ahead and perform the tweaks personally. Having a professional web designer make the changes, however, is a much better choice if you want your website to look as professional as it can get.

About the Author

Sarah Munn is the Outreach Manager of Phoenix Web Design, a web design company based in Phoenix, Arizona that specializes in creating bespoke and responsive websites that will surely grab people’s attention. When not writing content, she spends time with her grandparents and giving back to the community.