10 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Look More Professional: A Checklist for Creative Entrepreneurs

Having a professional-looking website will help you come across your audience and clients as a respectable and trustworthy business owner. In this checklist, I will walk you through 10 easy steps to make your website look more professional.

10 steps to make your website look more professional:

Choose the right colour scheme
Use high-quality images and graphics
Make your navigation intuitive and easy to use
Choose the right typography
Keep your website simple and clean
Ensure your website is mobile friendly
Use social media to your advantage
Pay attention to details
Optimize website speed and performance
Test and Iterate

Step 1: Choose the right colour scheme

Your colour scheme will affect how your overall website looks and feels. You’ll want to choose a colour scheme that represents and matches your brand while still making use of some neutral colours to allow for balance and lightness.

If you don’t have an established brand I highly recommend diving into the Design Seeds website for colour inspiration. If you do have a brand I love using Adobe Color (previously Kuler) to look for colours that balance out the colours on your logo.

Step 2: Use high-quality images and graphics

Having the right images on your website will help you pull people in. You’ll want to use high-quality images that reflect your brand’s mood and feeling.

Stock photography websites are great places to look for and find images for your site, my top 3 favourite websites are:

Step 3: Make navigation intuitive and easy to use

Your navigation is how your visitors and clients will get around your website, you want to keep it simple and easy to use.

Make sure to identify your different pages with simple and easy-to-understand names in your navigation. You don’t necessarily need to have everything linked in your navigation, stick to the main pages that people need to know about and link to secondary pages from those pages.

Your navigation is about answering questions for your audience, where do I get started? Who are you? What services do your offer? etc. Make sure to have items in your navigation to answer your visitors’ most common questions.

Step 4: Choose the right typography

Typography or the fonts you use on your website will affect the readability of your content but also the feel of your website.

Serif fonts tend to come across as more rigid, professional or even traditional, whereas non-serif fonts feel more casual, fun and modern. Script fonts are great for details or accents but shouldn’t be used for long strings of text as they are harder to read.

I recommend sticking to 1 or 2 fonts for your titles and text and having an extra script font for occasional accents.

Step 5: Keep your website simple and clean

Less is often more when it comes to website design. A cluttered website can feel overwhelming and make it difficult to understand or take in information.

Prioritize white space in your design giving each element enough space to breathe. Stay consistent in your layout across different pages reusing the same structure and elements when it makes sense. And break your content up with images to separate different sections.

Step 6: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Over 50% of people that visit your website will do so on their phones! This makes it imperative to optimize your website for mobiles.

This means resizing elements appropriately for mobile devices and adjusting font sizes and functionalities for use on the phone.

Before sharing your site with the world make sure to test it thoroughly on your phone and make any necessary adjustments. A good experience on mobile with going a long way for your website.

Step 7: Use social media to your advantage

Whether we love it or hate it social media has become an important part of your business.

Make sure to include icons on your active social media accounts on your site and share your content on social media. And remember to choose social platforms that are relevant to your business and that you enjoy staying active on.

Step 8: Pay attention to details

The devil is in the details! Keeping on top of the details of your website like broken links and spelling will go a long way to make your website look professional.

My top recommendation is to get another set of eyes on your website, check that all your links are working and make sure that your spelling is on point!

Step 9: Optimize website speed and performance

Do your best to make sure that your website is fast and optimized for speed and SEO. SEO will help you reach more people and a fast website will make sure that the people you reach have a good experience when visiting your website.

Take a look at the articles below for some tips on how to optimize your website:

Step 10: Test and iterate

Testing and iterating are crucial to keeping your website up-to-date and looking professional. You should be testing your website regularly and take time to make improvements to it whenever you can.

Apart from testing for errors and technical issues take some time to go over your website content and update it regularly, you want your website to feel current and relevant.

Go over these 10 easy steps whenever you feel your website could use some sprucing up! If your looking for help with your website feel free to reach out here. And if you’re looking to learn more on how to build your website from scratch sign up here to learn when my new course launches!