Ready to become a DIY web designer?
Designing an attractive website from scratch is no mean feat – but it's absolutely essential if you want to keep visitors on your site for more than 15 seconds. Thankfully, with WordPress, you don’t have to worry about a thing. All the components you need to dress your site to the nines are readily built and right there in front of you...
It’s true! Anyone can create a visually appealing website with WordPress regardless of technical ability. You just need to know where to look, understand a few basic principles, and tick the right boxes to ensure you choose the design path that fits your target audience like a glove.
So without further ado, join us on this short trip down ‘Web Design Lane’ and become an expert on the thousands of tools, themes and templates WordPress has got in its ever-expanding locker.
Good design goes a long way
We can’t stress the importance of good site design enough. Put yourself in your visitors' shoes for a second. If you opened a website and your first impression of the visuals gave amateur, unattractive, or lazy, how would you perceive that business?
This is where the trust factor comes in. Sure, you want potential customers to be wowed by what they see, but you also want them to take you seriously – as a business that has all their ducks in a row, and that can be trusted with their custom. Only by knowing your audience down to a tee can you foster this crucial connection with your web design.
A great website should answer the following questions (and look good while doing it):
- What are you selling?
- Why should potential customers care?
- What makes your business stand out?
- Who else uses your service/products?
- How can customers contact you?
Don’t forget about your competitors either. Consumers are impatient and will waste no time bouncing over to another business if they’re visually turned away. But there’s no need to get overly fixated on being super unique. Consistent visuals with your branding should take care of that. Getting the basics right is the most important thing – like a digestible landing page arrangement, accessible products, and eye-catching copy in an easy-to-read font and size.
Ultimately, your website is a vessel that helps take your customers from A (their first visit to your homepage) to B (a buy-in or conversion). Good design will keep them interested, but bad design will send them packing, regardless of how groundbreaking your product or service is.
Check out these aesthetically pleasing WordPress web design examples to see these elements in action, and hopefully provide some useful inspo.
Design to-do list
Wondering where to start? Well, these essential to-do's will not only help you work through web design more strategically, but give you a good understanding of what really matters, and which WordPress features can elevate your site design.
1. Find your font
Your font can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to echoing brand identity. Professional, technical, playful – the way your words look can shift the whole vibe of your website and how your business is perceived, so bear that in mind.
It also impacts readability and accessibility. If your audience has to work hard to process key information, then they’ll be hard to retain and likely abandon ship. As a rule of thumb, choose a colour palette that maximises contrast – for example, dark text on a white background. And keep in mind that about 300 million people in the world are colour blind, so you’ll want to stay away from red/green or blue/yellow combos.
Not got a specific font in mind? WordPress has plenty to choose from, both in the full site editor and built-in to certain themes, all of which are customisable.
2. Choose your colour scheme
Colour psychology can affect human responses, change the way people feel, and influence the choices consumers make. With that in mind, we don't advise you adopt a 'pick a colour, any colour' mentality. Your brand image and memorable identity is at stake.
Speak to your specific audience by carefully choosing a colour palette from the customiser in your WordPress dashboard. Select from preset colours, or pick your own to find the winning combination for your website. Not too sure which will convert more? Try A/B testing a few different options – but don’t stray too far from your core brand identity in the process.
3. Embrace templates
Get the right look, feel, and layout for each individual page on your website by making use of WordPress templates. A quick and easy way, with plenty of choice, to give shape and foundation to your web pages.
Each area of your site will serve a different purpose, so bear that in mind when you choose your template.
As well as having multiple templates across your site, you can pick more than one on the same page – i.e. a different header and footer. Take the time to think about what function each page will perform, and choose based on that.
4. Pick the right theme
There are over 30,000 themes available in the WordPress universe. Each has its own personality and dictates the style of your website in a different way. As well as aesthetics, your theme will determine how your users interact with your site. So as far as the overall user experience goes, this one really is a deal breaker.
Again, knowing your audience and aligning with their persona should drive your choice here. It’s all about attracting attention, retaining visitors and increasing brand awareness and reputation. Search through thousands of free options within WordPress, pay for premium themes externally, or ask us to help you find the right one – we’ll even pre-install one if you want!
5. Plug in your plugins
For extra customisation in line with your niche and to really refine your design down to a fine art, call in a couple of plugins. As well as streamlining laborious design and editing tasks, plugins can give you additional functionality that templates and themes might not have available.
Search within your industry, get creative, and go the extra mile for your audience without breaking a sweat. There’s 70,000+ plugins out there, so rather than getting lost in all that, we suggest you start here for your web design.
6. Want widgets?
Widgets are a great way to add a finishing touch or additional layer to the design and user experience of your website. They’re like extra components that sit beside a web page’s main content to provide added functionality for visitors – such as media, navigation links, or a tidbit of useful information.
Place them on all, some or none of your pages, it’s up to you! Just be careful not to overcrowd for the sake of it.
Widgets shouldn’t be there if they aren't serving a useful purpose for your audience. WordPress has plenty of default options, like calendars and archives, or you can download external widget plugins to get even more creative.
Don't stop at design
Ready to grab your website by the horns and get your design groove on? As you’ve seen, WordPress has all the tools you’ll ever need to craft the most aesthetically pleasing, visually stimulating, conversion-friendly website around. One thing you can’t DIY, however, is your hosting.
Regardless of aesthetics, if you can’t stay online or your pages take forever to load, it will all be for nothing. At Fasthosts, we take pride in doing all the heavy lifting here, giving you incredible page speeds, exceptional uptime, and built-in security to keep your website alive and kicking to its full potential.
Check out our Hosting for WordPress packages to see how we can help. And if you need to chat, give us a call on 0333 0142 700 or message us via live chat. We'd be happy to answer any questions you have.
