Tips to Help You Get Creative While Designing Your Site Featured.jpg

Tips to Help You Get Creative While Designing Your Site

When you decide to build your own website with the website builder from Websites 360®, you’ll have lots of beautifully designed templates to choose from. And, although our templates are stunning on their own, they can — and should be — customized for you!

Website templates have a reputation for being cookie-cutter, but it’s only because many business owners make the mistake of leaving the template they use as is with minimal changes. With the ability to fully customize your website, you can make your Websites 360 site truly your own.

There’s a lot of competition online, and it’s important to ensure that your business’s website will stand out among the crowd. That means that you need a little bit of creativity on your site.

As important as creativity is when designing your website, the ability to actually find the spark of creativity can sometimes seem out of reach. We all have the ability to be creative, but some of us are more creative than others. It’s also not something that comes naturally to all of us.

How to get creative while designing your website

#1. Check out other websites

Just as artists and musicians find inspiration through the work of other artists and musicians, so can web designers. When you need to find a little inspiration, a great place to start is by checking out websites that others have designed. This can be particularly helpful when you check out the websites of other businesses in your industry, including that of your competition.

You’ll find that there’s a wide range of quality in the websites you find online. The sites with the best designs can help to spark ideas that you can adopt in your own way on your website, and the sites with the worst designs can help you avoid errors and mistakes that can hurt the look and feel of your website.

#2. Find inspiration offline

The internet is a great place to get inspired for designing your website, but it’s not the only place you should look by a long shot. In fact, you can find inspiration almost anywhere; you just have to be open to it when it comes!

The world is full of incredible design inspiration. From natural wonders like the setting sun over the mountains and the colorful monarch butterfly to man-made wonders like paintings, architecture, music, and even graffiti, the world is full of beauty that can help to spark your own creativity.

Creativity is one of those elusive things that you don’t always find when you go out looking for it, so it’s important to be prepared. Keep a camera and a notebook with you so that, when inspiration strikes, you’ll be ready to capture it and remember it.

#3. Educate yourself on color theory

Color will have a huge impact on the visual appeal of your website, but it goes far beyond simple aesthetics. In addition to making your website look a certain way, the colors that you choose can evoke different feelings in your visitors, which could help to entice them to make a purchase, contact you to schedule an appointment, or click the back button!

Learning the basic psychology of color will help ensure that the colors you choose not only look great but also send the right message. With this knowledge, you can create the ideal mood on your website.

In addition to learning the psychology of color, you should also learn about which colors are complementary and contrasting so that you can mix and match the colors on your website accordingly.

#4. Familiarize yourself with typography

A lot of designers get so caught up in choosing the right colors and images on their website that they don’t think at all about typography. Typography, which includes font styles, font sizes, line spacing, etc., just like color, can have a huge impact on how your site looks and feels, and it’s important to know a bit more about it so that you can send the right message.

There are so many different fonts that you could choose from for your website, and each one will send a different kind of message. However, font style is just one of the many aspects of typography that can affect how your site looks and how readable it is. The size of the text, the color of the text, the amount of space between each line of text all have important parts to play.

There are many general rules of thumb when it comes to website typography, one of the most important of which has to do with font styles. While it’s OK to use multiple font styles on your website; you should keep the number of styles you choose to a minimum. Most websites should have no more than three font styles.

#5. Sketch out ideas on paper

Sometimes, translating the ideas you have in your head to your website can be challenging, as you might not have the design skills to know exactly how. In situations like these, your best bet is often to take the design offline by sketching it out on a piece of paper.

Starting your website design with a pencil and a piece of paper can help you achieve something essential in the design process — getting the ideas that are in your brain out. Once your ideas are out on paper, you can start figuring out how to make your website what you want it to be.

Even if you’re not quite sure what you want your website to look like, starting with a sketch can help you find creative ideas along the way. Plus, when you take a step back from the design process online, it can help you find more inspiration.

Templates are a great place to start building your own DIY website, but making your site your own will take a little creativity. I hope that this blog will help you find that spark of creativity you need to make your website your own, but if you’d like help with the website design, we can help you there, too. Learn more.

Originally published on 2/24/20