The 10 Most Important Web Design Tips for 2021

I’m going to give you 10 very simple steps. If you’re building your own website, or if you’ve hired a web developer to work on your website, these are very simple 10 steps that you can not bypass.

1. Add a Clear Call to Action

Number one is having a clear call to action on your website. Very simply put when the perfect visitor comes to your website, what do you hope to achieve and make sure that you can achieve that. This is a conversation I have with my web development clients and as simple of a question as it is, sometimes it’s difficult to answer. I want you to choose one major call to action and yes, of course, some services, some websites also have other call to actions, but choose one.

I want that to be front and center. I want that to be a part of your top hero image. I want it to be as clear as day upon the first time I see your website. What is it that you’re offering? Is it a service? Is it a product? Um, simple, easy to understand call to action with a click that sends you to the page that you want to send your user or your visitor to.

2. K.I.S.S

Number two is keep it simple, stupid. I do not need to bring out a calculator to decide which direction or which page I should view in order to find what I’m looking for. So keep it very simple and stupid use terminology and words that people understand. You’re building it for your user. Make it as simple as possible. Uh, very quickly. What do I mean top menu use words like home, about services, blog, shop, contact portfolio gallery.

I have some clients in though, right? Like instead of blog, they’ll put my daily diary of life. As I see it, I said, what, that’s the title of the menu bar it’s ridiculously long.

3. Add Images

And it’s number three is adding personality and stock imagery. I can go to our website right off the bat and say, Oh, stock stock, stock, stock stock. And then the next button I’m going to hit is the close button. I cannot take you seriously as a website, even the beginner website, if every image is stock, and if you’re going to use stock images, don’t let them look like stock images. Don’t cheap out. There’s certain things you can, you know, cut corners on. There’s other things you should not in business. Stock images are not the key. I have some clients that do renovation and they do good renovation. And when I ask them for portfolio pieces, they’ll say we didn’t have a good enough photographer.

So let’s just use stock images like any phone today in 2021 has a high enough quality that you can photograph with no background.

4. Keep it Consistent

Number four is consistency is the key to success. You’re trying to create a brand identity online. It has to be symmetrical fonts on every single page should remain. The same header should all be the same color and the same size buttons. If you have a call to action button, they should remain the same shape, the same color on every single page. Consistency.

5. Ease of Navigation

Number five is easy to navigate. We all liked the menu in the top. We all liked the menu in the footer. Simple, very simple, and we’re not breaking any rules. Uh, clients come into me all the time and say, Whoa, I like that new menu. With the three lines us, we call it a hamburger menu that is specifically for mobile devices.

You do not want that on a desktop. You want that on a mobile device. You’re trying to dumb down the number of clicks in order to find your contact and find your navigation and find your menu. So why would you want a hamburger there that they have to click on in order to see the navigation? Let the navigation sit where it’s supposed to sit at all times, make the navigation throughout your website. Very easy. So, I mean, if you have a picture, a text in a little button that links to a service page that you’re offering make the whole area linkable, not just the little button link, the picture, link the text, like the button, easy to navigate, easy for your user to find what they are looking for.

6. Use Keywords

Number six is used keywords throughout the site. Where do keywords come from? What the hell are words? Um, please look into it.

7. Contact Information

Number seven is easy to find contact information you need absolutely all the time. You need a contact page in the top right side of your menu. Not the left, not the middle top, right? That’s where everybody looks when looking for contact top right top right top, right? This should be no different contact. Information is vital for most companies. If you’re looking to generate leads and you want phone calls and you want people calling for price quotes, or you want to sell a product, guess what? Your users, your visitors, your potential clients are looking for your contact information.

8. 3 Click Maximum

Number eight is limit the number of clicks. Very simply put you want to dumb this down. Once again, you can build your website and now count the number of clicks it takes to let’s say, find your number one service, or to find your contact page. Meaning do I have to jump through hoops, run through fire, swim through an ocean full of sharks in order to find the page I’m looking for? Or can I simply look in the navigation one, click on your contact page because I’m in the web development business. I hear this all the time. Why I want to build a five-step process for checkout. Why the hell do you want to build a five-step process for checkout? Everyone else is doing it is doing it in three steps. Why do you want five? Why make this more difficult for your user? Big companies like Amazon?

You can very easily look at their checkout process, reverse engineer. It, you know, what’s working for them. They’re proven leaders in the industry. I’m sure there’s no doubt to that. Why do you want to do something more difficult than Amazon? Three step processes? The key to success, dumbed down the number of clicks that are required for your user to find what they’re looking for to purchase a product, to check out or to contact you or to find anything on your website.

9. Build Websites for your Customers – Not for You

Number nine has stopped building websites for yourself. Stop it. This website is not for you. You’re the owner. You’re the founder. You’re the creator. You’re the mastermind behind the business. I’ll give you all the credits that you deserve, but when it comes down to building the website, build it for your user. Don’t do not. Over-complicate your website. I don’t care if your favorite animal is a unicorn and your favorite colors are pink and purple polka dots with zebra, Stripe tiger. I do not want to see that on your website.

10. Use Statistics

Number 10 is follow your statistics. How do you know what’s working? And what’s not. If you’re not looking at statistics. So you’ve gone through this whole process. Either you build the website yourself, or you hired a developer to do it, or any combination of both, the website is live. You’re so happy. You built the website. This is the website of your dreams. You love it. You think it looks perfect. And now what? You just let it sit and hope that people are gonna find you. They’re not hiring you for your service or purchasing your product. Now what, well, guess what? You don’t have to start from scratch. Simply look at the statistics, install Google analytics, and understand the very basics of statistics. Follow stats, make improvements based on the stats that you see, and you’ll only get better. You’ll always get better. Don’t you want to get better? The answer is yes.

5 Reasons to start a website

Personal Website for Branding

So the first reason you might want a website is to simply have a personal page where you can share all your social media links in one place. So in this case hosting, or has a website builder who does pretty good for basic static websites, or you could always use WordPress if you want, we’ll get to that later, but here you can see, after I pick the template, I want, I’m just going to edit a bit of the text, change, the social media icons, to the ones I want and just kind of move them around in general, get the design, how I want looking.

And then, like I said, this would be a really basic case where it’s just a hub for all your links, nothing too fancy, and you can change it. So there are no pictures if you don’t want, or you can have the pictures in there and just change them around. However, and this website builder in particular has a thing called auto layout, which is supposed to auto adjust the layout you make, depending on whether you’re being viewed on a desktop or mobile, but you might want to just disable that and do it yourself. Sometimes that way you can pick exactly how you want it to look on mobile instead of relying on the automatic mode. So that’s just why I like to prefer now.

Portfolio Website

The next reason you might be able to use a website is if you just want a web resume or like a general about me type site.So this might be good. For example, if someone does a search for you on Google, then there’s a good chance that your site will be one of the top results. Especially if the domain name is just your full name. So if you go to do this, you could have this just as a separate page in your site that you already created with a social media one, or just have the about page, be your main page. But in this case, I’ll just create a new page as an example. And I just copied everything over. So we’ll kind of have to clear that out a bit. And when I go to add some text, there’s a few different blocks they’re called, which I’ll bring in. And this one seems about right, it’s overlaid over some of the previous stuff. So I’ll just rearrange all that. And you can change around all the pictures and stuff.

Obviously, maybe don’t want to keep it as default, maybe do. And I may as well upload a profile picture to put on the side and then make sure that it gets resized correctly. So it’s not stretching. I’m not going to write a whole novel here, but you can probably imagine what you might want to put here. Like if you want to list all your achievements skills, your work history, education, stuff like that might be good for a resume type thing. And again, this is going to be a really basic example. You could probably make it look a lot more fancy if you want it to, by adding a few more pictures, you could also use a different block layout. So maybe you could add one with some rows and images. If you want specific picture for each job description, that would look pretty cool. So you can really get it however you want.

Photo Website

Now, a third use for a website might be, if you want to host your photos, you take somewhere besides just on Instagram or Facebook. So you could use the website builder for this too. Or if you play and update it frequently, and with new pictures, it might make more sense to use WordPress, which is like a framework for blogs. It’s the most popular one out there hosting her does actually offer an auto installer for WordPress. You can just set it up automatically. Yeah, you have to do it yourself. And then it’s just a matter of choosing a theme. First there’s countless free ones. So I just searched photo folio and found a decent one called Hitchcock. And then I can customize it a bit like changing the background and removing any extra stuff like the footer. I don’t need all that stuff. Now with WordPress, there’s a few different ways to do things depending on the theme.

So there are things called pages and posts, but for this theme of particular, what we’ll do I’ll do is customize it. So the homepage just displays latest posts and then you can create a new post for each picture. You’ll see what I’m talking about. So for example, if we go and create a new post and then add an image block and then upload a picture, which I already did and I selected here, and then you can caption it however you want, if people click on it. And then also in this particular theme, you have to make sure it’s set as a featured image as well. So it will show up on the main page page as you’ll see. And then you can add as many posts with pictures as you want, or add multiple pictures to a post. And then whichever one you said is the, the featured image is the one that will show up on the main page.So that’s just one example with one theme and you can obviously do more like adding text and stories to each post and whatnot.

Host Website

So next up another really useful reason to have a website. It is if you want to host your own files on there, of course there are other options, like if you want to use Google drive or Dropbox for sharing files, but they come in handy to upload certain files on your own site in a few situations, because there’ll be accessible from anywhere. For example, maybe there’s some file you use regularly, but you aren’t always in a place where you can want to, or can’t log into your Google drive account or whatever, like a public pewter you don’t trust maybe, or your friend’s house. If you store that file on a website, as long as you remember the URL of the file, you can access it from anywhere.

Just hand it out. Now, obviously it probably isn’t wise to upload anything confidential because technically it would be publicly available to anyone who can get the URL, right. But if it’s something innocuous, that’s fine. Anyway, all web hosts will have some way to upload files to your site. And usually a user interface in the form of a file manager like here. And then you can see all the files in your directory of your website. And since my WordPress installation is in there, there’s a lot of files already. So I’ll just create a new folder, call it my stuff. And then here you can upload whatever you want. And then you can also create a new file, like a text file. And then you can see that if you go to the same URL as the directory structure, there’s the file. So in this case, the website slash my stuff, slash example dot text, and then it comes up.

Another way this might be useful is if you have to share a certain file with a lot of people, you can just give everyone the URL, the file, which is probably going to be a lot shorter and easier to remember, then a lot of file sharing services, which generate a big, unique, long string with the URL, which is okay if you’re just sending the link in an email or something, but it might be difficult if you have to actually like speak it out and try to remember anyway, I’m sure you can imagine how this might come in handy. All right.

Custom Website Email

Now, finally, another really great reason to have your own domain and website is so you can set up your own custom email address on that domain. This may or not be a separate add on with your host. And there are a ton of different ways to do it with hosting, or for example, they have a pretty easy setup and it just integrates with a service called flock mail, but you can just choose any email address you want on your domain, and then just start using it.

If you’re a bit more tech savvy, you can even set up G suite, which is a Google service, which basically lets you use the Gmail interface with your own domain email address, which is what I do personally, but that does require editing DNS MX records. And I’m definitely not going to get into that today. So if you don’t know what all that is, don’t worry about that. There are really easy ways to do it just through your host. Now you might be wondering why you would care to have an email address of your own. And that’s a good question. First of all, it’s pretty cool. Obviously, when you give people your email address and the domain is your actual name or something instead of just being Gmail or your ISP domain, it just seems a little bit more professional. I think another big reason is you’ll always have complete control over that email address because you own the domain name.

Like if you use an email address through your ISP and you move and change RSPs, what are you going to do? They might let you keep it, but I’m not sure. And it will depend on that ISP or even if for whatever reason, maybe your Google account gets banned taking your Gmail account along with it. Then you’d kind of be screwed if you own your own domain though. You own every email address on that. So even if you were using G suite to host your emails and you’ve got your Google account banned, you could just redirect the domains, DNS mail records to a different service and keep using the same email address over there. It just lets you have complete control over your email address. So maybe by now, if you never saw the point of having a website of her own, well, maybe you’ve changed your mind or at least see how it might be something worth looking into in the future.