Websites are one of the best ways of generating new client enquiries.
Everyone searches online for products and services, so it goes without saying, without a website you’ll be losing out, how can people find you if you don’t have one?
So from this point onwards, let’s assume you already have a website.
You want it to look nice and something that will impress your potential customers.
But money is tight, so how can you find the cheapest ways of making your site stand out?
In this article, we’ll cover eight cheap ways to make your website look great
1- Focus on the colours of your website
When designing your website, it can be tempting to want to use many bright and eye-catching colours in order for the site’s design to stand out.
However, this may make just looking at your page a frustrating experience with such an overload of information on one screen.
Not only that but, bright and garish colours can hurt your eyes.
That’s not to say you can’t use vivid colours, but more the fact that if you do you have to contrast with colours that work well together.
Colour plays a huge role in how people perceive things.
A professional web designer will know how to limit a colour palette so that people are able to enjoy viewing the content they’re interested in reading.
Using colours in your website design can be a great way to express the personality of your brand.
Too many different, bright colours may make it seem chaotic and disorganised which could discourage potential customers from using or purchasing products at all if they believe there is no sense of direction on what product does what.
A better idea would be picking one main colour for the background with an accent colour or two that you will also use throughout various other aspects such as text and backgrounds like buttons and banners
There are a couple of really cool free tools online that can help you develop a colour palate for your website:
Coolors – allows you to generate or browse through thousands of options
Color Hunt – Again offers a great wealth of options here.
Once you have your colours sorted, it’s a very easy and more importantly a cheap way to make your website look great.
2 – Let’s not forget the white space!
White space is an important design element that helps clean up your site and make it more user-friendly.
Designers use white spaces to guide readers’ eyes through the page, making a website less overwhelming for visitors.
Designs can be cluttered because of so many different elements competing for attention on one screen.
White spaces help create order by opening up blank areas in between other content; these empty spots are there as guides to direct viewers where they should look next: every new point needs its own spot on the webpage or else you risk confusing users with too much information all at once!
User engagement is a key component to any successful site, and the clean aesthetic of your design can be used as an advantage.
White space provides ample opportunity for you to use white space strategically on your page in order to capture user attention with text or images that are meant for conversion.
How do we build sites so they’re easy to use?
By introducing the “clean aesthetic!”
Cleaner space helps visitors locate graphics easier, such as making CTAs (call to actions) stand out.
Adding white space to your website if it’s cluttered really isn’t going to break the bank!
3 – A small change in fonts can make a huge difference
You’re designing a website for many different people to use, but what you may not know is that some of them are going to be using it on mobile devices.
This means the text needs to look good and easy-to-read when they do this.
When picking fonts, make sure everyone can read your texts with ease, even those who are viewing via their phones!
Odds are not everyone is going to sit there and read all the text that you have written out, but if it’s hard to read then the chances they’ll stick around reading your content decrease.
Your writing should guide visitors by drawing their attention towards important stuff while informing them of what’s on offer.
Here are ten things to consider when deciding on fonts for your website.
- Font size
- Line width
- Line spacing
- Barrel width
- Contrast
- Structure
- A maximum of two or three font types
- Capitals
- Standard fonts available
Swapping fonts and making them look incredible is something fairly straightforward to achieve and costs nothing other than time to get it done.
4 – A picture is worth a thousand words
Photos are the first things people notice when they land on your website.
Your brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text and with the average website first impression being around 50 milliseconds, you can see that images are really important.
What message do you want your images to convey?
Are they professional?
Big, high-quality photos will make a more lasting impression than small blurry ones that can be hard for viewers to appreciate what’s going on in them.
If you have your own images ensure they were taken by someone who is familiar with your company and understands how best to showcase its personality.
Stock photography might not fit into an aesthetic established by one’s own photo gallery and could seem out of place among other content provided.
It’s not the best option using stock photography, although for some it will be the only option with a limited budget or skill set at taking images.
Photos provide context like no words ever would – often conveying emotions too complex for mere language alone.
Although some images don’t always have clear messages themselves without some explanation from accompanying text!
Swapping images on a regular basis is a quick way to make your website look great, plus it’s inexpensive to do so.
5 – Graphics are another way to easily make your website look better
With so many websites competing for attention, it’s important to take every opportunity to grab a viewer and keep them around.
Graphics are one of the most powerful tools you can use on your website because they not only draw in viewers but also help them focus on what matters.
Animated graphics even have the potential to elevate your design from good enough or average-looking and give an extra edge that will make all the difference when someone finally clicks through!
Graphics can be used especially well to illustrate certain elements like USPs, step-by-step processes, increases or decreases, in fact, they have hundreds of uses.
As an example, if your website it’s talking about how sustainable your company is, a graphic of the earth with a recycle symbol will really help convey that message.
They need to look professional, and it may be better to hire a competent designer, alternatively, there are graphic stock sites where you can browse and find ones that work for you.
6 – Add strategic call to actions
When visitors come to your website, they may be looking for a specific destination.
However, it can often feel like there are no clear instructions on how to find things on sites or what steps need to be taken in order to get where they want to go.
Providing calls-to-action that capture their attention and lead them explicitly is an important way of improving the user experience.
As well as showing them that you have had enough forethought about where someone might click before landing on your page!
There’s more than one way between Point A and point B – but when navigating through web pages sometimes people aren’t sure which step takes them closer towards their desired destination until something catches their eye (that big yellow button!).
What does this mean?
It means having a strategic call to action in areas that you believe a user will want to go to.
As a basic example, let’s say you’re a diet company offering meal replacements with a free trial of a days’ worth of food.
You have a great piece of text and images talking about the benefits and how amazing the diet is. Around this, you would want to add buttons saying “try me for free”.
You know that someone looking at that page, their next stage would be either to try the diet or purchase.
Don’t make them hunt all over to make the next step, this is what CTA’s are.
It’s very easy to add CTA’s to your website, if you have long swathes of text with nothing for the user to do once read, where should they go?
If you don’t have products to sell, it could link to a contact form for example, as their next step could be to get in touch.
Your CTAs can be anything, a download, a purchase, signup to a newsletter, to watch a video or simply to give you a call.
Cheap and easy to add to your website.
7 – Video is super powerful and cheap to add to your site to generate interest
Do you want to stand out from the rest?
You need to incorporate video into your website.
Videos have been proven not only to better engage viewers but also make your website seem more modern and fresher than pictures ever would.
You can hook your customers with a video because they’re less likely to read about the key elements of your brand.
A short, attention-grabbing video on one of those pages is worth its weight in gold.
When it comes right down to getting them interested and keeping their interest levels high video is the way forward.
There is a reason that YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google!
8 – Make sure your website is mobile optimised
Now out of all the points, this is the most important and probably the most expensive if your website isn’t up to scratch.
We have left it until last as the other seven points are relatively cheap and easy to implement.
It’s one that, depending on how your website was originally built may be a huge issue for you.
Who out there has a mobile phone and uses it to search daily for things on the web?
I guess, nearly all.
So you go to a website and you can’t navigate properly, the text is off the page, fonts are tiny and buttons are unclickable….you get the picture.
The real issue is that the majority of searches, in fact just under 57% are now done on mobile devices, as opposed to 41% on desktop.
Mobile responsiveness is essential for today’s mobile users.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a website or an app, your customers are looking to see information easy and comfortable on their screens; otherwise they’ll be exiting out of the site just as fast as they came in!
As above, this isn’t an easy one to sort if it looks and works terrible, but it’s something that you HAVE to invest in if you want to make your website look great and work perfectly for the majority of website users.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to improve the look of your website cheaply, there are a lot of really great resources out there that can help.
You may not be able to afford expensive consultants or designers right now (or ever), but with these 8 key steps we’ve outlined for you today, it’s possible that you could have a better-looking site than before without spending much money at all!
So try some new fonts and colours on your site this week.
You never know, that small change might make everything feel fresh and make your website look great again.
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