In this digital age, a personal website has to be one of the most valuable marketing assets you can have at your disposal. If the website is well designed, then the visitors drawn in by your portfolio and content will be easier to convert into paying customers.
The importance of this simple asset puts a lot of pressure on the person building it to make clever design decisions, and as few mistakes along the way as possible.
But, good strategy and careful planning always make half the work done. Let us take a look then at a couple of web design tips and tricks that will help you create your personal website from scratch and turn it into a powerful marketing tool that will keep on bringing new customers.
5 Effective Web Design Tips and Tricks
1. Define the goals and the message you are sending out
Achieving success in any field is much easier if you actually know what you want to accomplish. So, before proceeding to any technical considerations, give your future website a quick business plan treatment and try to identify its mission statement, the message you are trying to convey to its visitors, the goals you are trying to accomplish, and the time limits in which you want to meet these goals.
Make sure to come up with some relevant KPIs that will help you keep track of the progress. Having these tools at your disposal will make any hard decisions further down the road much easier.
2. Use productive website elements
In this regard, personal websites are no different from any other marketing strategies – some elements and resources simply bear better results than their dated or less efficient counterparts.
As a baseline, you should condense all the messages you are going to communicate in short elevator pitches you will be able to tuck in across the website pages. Also, be sure to leverage the following resources:
- An easy to remember slogan or tagline
- Client testimonials
- Blog section
- The selection of your best works
- “About me” page
While you are doing that, try to remember that the visitors don’t want to read an in-depth story about your life but rather a short, snappy, and engaging rewind of your career highlights.
3. Come up with an appealing domain
A domain name can make or break the success of your personal website. If you create something that is too long, convoluted, and hard to remember, the visitors will have a very hard time finding your website even in spite of your SEO efforts.
So, for a start, try to stand out and create something fun and creative. Getting a .me personal domain or some other inventive alternative will give you a lot of room to play. Also, keep in mind that the most effective domain names feature no more than 12 characters, don’t include any kind of numbers, special signs of hyphens, and preferably, leverage keywords or locations.
4. Make the website mobile-ready and easy to navigate
At this very moment, 48.71 percent of global website traffic occurs on mobile devices (tablets excluded). Satisfying the needs of this vast consumer pool should be one of your first priorities.
Do that, by skipping dated technologies like Flash, making CSS and images as light as possible, choosing a mobile-friendly template (wide margin as well as large and easy to read fonts), optimizing the button placement and size, and eliminating annoying desktop-sized pop-ups. As for ease of navigation, you can use some of the following guidelines:
- Build all pages around the core website purpose
- Employ chatbots
- Make everything clickable
- Use the navigation and search bars
- Allow visitors to follow breadcrumbs
- Keep the navigation consistent
- Follow the 3-click rule (everything should be accessible in 3 clicks)
5. Nail the blog section
The reasons for starting a blog are virtually countless but if we had to single out one reason to do it, that would be the immeasurable organic traffic your website is going to receive from the visitors that are not even interested, at least for the time being, in hiring your services.
Therefore, take some time to research the good blogging practices and start releasing content as soon as possible. Ideally, your blog posts should feature the following qualities:
- Be concise (between 1,500 and 2,500)
- Be digestible and easy to read
- Use interesting visuals
- Break down extensive walls of text
- Feature compelling titles
- Frequently use subheadings and bullet points to break up the page
- Feature a clear and decisive call to action
In conclusion
We hope these few guidelines will help you build your personal website from the ground up and use it to convert as many visitors as possible. Although modern digital marketing uses dozens of different strategies to appeal to different groups of users, all these approaches converge at one single point. You guessed it – your personal website. Use this neat fact then to make it as effective as possible and make sure the people coming in to check out what you have to offer don’t leave unimpressed.
