Make your website stand out and work for you [How To]

How to make your website stand out and work for you

In today’s competitive marketplace, every business, whether big, medium or small needs a top-quality website to thrive.

It is no longer viable for a company to have the “skeleton” website with just an “about us” and “contact section”.  Nowadays potential and existing customers want to be able to do more online, they want you to make your website stand out.  With the right approach, you can create an engaging, professional and effective website without hiring a developer and paying an arm and a leg just to get things started and set up and to make your website stand out.

If you can remember a day without websites, it was extremely expensive and horribly difficult to have a website without having experience or hiring a developer and let us not get started on how difficult it was to update or make changes.  Luckily technology has developed in wonderous ways of the years and now it has made developing, building and managing a website it much easier.

Even if you don’t have extensive experience in graphic or web design, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a website that will be unique and will grab customer’s attention.  We at Nairobi Garage have found you some of the most important things that you need on your website to make it stand out.

Keep to a simplistic design

We live and work in a very busy world, and let’s be honest, when you go onto a website, you don’t want to have to search for the information you want.  You look for specific keywords, points of information and even images to find out whether you are in the right place.  With this kind of web surfing behaviour in mind, remember to appeal to the emotions rather than the word count.

The less time it takes for someone to get the information they need from your site, the better they will be able to process, remember and evaluate what they are looking at on their screen.  Of course, Content and Calls to Action are necessary, but make sure to make use of larger subheadings, legible paragraphs, images or icons to help communicate your point across.

Create easy to read content

When you start researching the “best content for your website” on Google, the word ‘Readability’ will come up quite a bit.  This basically refers to how easy it is for the reader to recognise words, sentences, and phrases from your website’s content.  When your site’s content is high, the people who visit your website will be able to scan your site and take in the information they are presented with without much effort.  Here are some ways you can achieve website readability for your company:

CONTRASTING COLOURS

When choosing your colours for your website, make sure that you choose colours that work well together.  I am sure you have come across a website at some point of your life that has such bright colours that it hurts your eyes.  A favourite lately has been a light grey background with a black text, which helps decrease the glare of the typical white background on a website.  Feel free to play with the colours on your site, don’t sacrifice readability for creativity.

YOU NEED TO SEE THE INFORMATION IN ORDER TO READ IT

When websites first came out, fonts were incredibly small and difficult to ready.  When you are sitting in front of a 24-inch screen, trying to read a website with 12pt font, you will start to struggle and squint to figure out what is being said.  A great rule of thumb is to keep your body text to at least 16pt.  Another thing to consider is what font you are going to use, try and keep it to a minimum of 3 different fonts on your site – remember our first rule – keep it simplistic and easy to read.  Here is a great site that will help your pair some of Google Fonts most favourite fonts: https://fontpair.co/

When choosing your font, use a font that is easy to read when you are on the site.  Although some of the fonts are beautiful when they are on images or used as headings, you cannot use it for full paragraph text.

Make sure people now how to get around

In your quest to make your website stand out from the rest of them, the one place that you cannot mess around with too much is the navigation of your website.  You don’t want new visitors to get lost or to go on a wild goose hunt when looking for information on your site.  Another big thing to remember when trying to make your website stand out, is to have a site with a solid navigation helps search engines index your content while improving the viewers’ experience.  Here are some tips to remember:

• Link your logo to your homepage. This most used practice is something that most visitors are used to and will save them some extra precious clicks.
• Make your menu accessible: This has one place it should always be – that is at the top of your website and structure it to the importance of each section of your website.
• If you have long pages on your website, make sure you have a one-click option where people will be able to go to the top/bottom of your website with ease.
• Don’t forget about your footer. Although the footer region is the very last thing your website users see – don’t forget to add in extra information, additional menus or even a sign up or call to action to button.

Keep it mobile friendly

More and more searches are happening on a mobile device, and the numbers are increasing daily!  You don’t want to be left out of the crowd when someone cannot access your website through their mobile device.  While you are designing your site – make sure to test it on different devices to see how different users will experience your website.

We have another free awesome website for you to test your websites mobile compatibility, SEO as well as other important aspects that will make your website run smoothly with no problems: https://website.grader.com

Never ever stop looking for inspiration, with technology growing and making the lives of business owners easier, there are always new ways of adding new information to your site with ease.  Research some of your competitors and find some websites that you find the nicest to use, take the parts you love the most and make your own piece of website art.  Following these few simple steps will help you on your journey to make your website stand out from the rest.

Are you looking for a place that inspires and motivates you to do more for yourself and your business, then book a tour with us and discover a coworking space that will get your creative juices flowing.