If your website was designed more than five years ago, or if you just didn’t put very much effort into crafting a beautiful site when you initially launched your site, you may be beginning to notice that your site just isn’t up to modern standards.
A website that feels out of date and poorly design will negatively affect your visitor”s experience as well as their perception of your content. The good news is that there are a few relatively simply tricks you can use to get your site spruced up quickly. While your long-term plans may need to include a full website redesign, implementing these tips will give your site a shot of life, and keep your website’s visitors coming back.
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Modernize & Refresh Your Color Scheme
Modern color schemes include a range of soft colors with strong accent colors. If you’re using an antiquated color scheme that seems too aggresive or dark when compared to modern sites, check out the most popular color schemes created at Adobe Color CC for some inspiration.
Use More Whitespace
If you’re refreshing your site’s color scheme, this is the perfect time to think about adding more whitespace to your site.
Spend a little time poking around the web. You may be surprised to realize that the vast majority of sites are either built on a white background, or include a great deal of whitespace. However, whitespace is about more than just the color of the background on your website. It’s also about paring down the busyness of your website and adding more space between elements. While this may involve some CSS tweaks to increase margins and padding around elements on the page, you can accomplish quite a bit by just increasing your website’s font size and line height.
Give Your Site a Shot of Life with Web Fonts
If you’re using standard fonts, consider giving your site a shot of life by incorporating Google Web Fonts. It’s a free service, and there are hundreds of attractive fonts to choose from. If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, look for a highly-rated plugin like Easy Google Fonts that will make integrating Google Fonts an easy and painless experience.
Modernize with Icons
Once you start watching out for them, you’ll quickly realize that icons are everywhere. They’ve become a staple of modern web design.
Adding icons to your site is pretty easy and can be done cheaply or even for free. A simple google search from free icons will produce lots of leads.
If you want to skip the search, check out Swifticons. Their premium pack is very reasonably priced and includes over 2000 beautiful icons. If you aren’t ready to open your wallet quite yet, their free pack includes over 100 icons.
Implement Responsive Design Principles
As we’ve gone through this list we’ve intentionally listed these tips in order of difficulty to implement. This last tip is the most challenging – you’ll either need to have basic web development skills or be prepared to work with a developer on this one. However, it’s also the tip that can do the most to improve an aging website.
Responsive web design is the practice of designing a website to render beautifully and functionally on a screen of any size. This means designing the elements of your webpage to resize to fit the width of any device screen. With more and more web browsing happening on smart phones and tablets, having a responsive website is no longer options – it’s mandatory.
If your website is powered by a mainstream content management system such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, there are many free or reasonably priced themes you could purchase and install that have responsiveness built-in. On the other hand, virtually any website can be modified to be responsive by a capable front-end developer through the use of CSS and JavaScript.
Keeping Up With the Times
If you’re ready to get your aging website back on track, implementing these tips will give your website a much-needed shot of life. If you want to go even further this article from Aborg will help you target areas of your site that need attention.