Category: Web Design

WebDesign

I’ve mentioned before on my Facebook page that I never realised how many websites I would design in my new career. I always thought it would be a great additional service I could offer but I’ve just completed my 7th website (including my own) since graduating and have another two lined up in the next few months.

As you may know, I design all my websites on WordPress. First of all the software is Open Source, which means anyone can create an account and design a website for free (*not including buying the domain name and hosting). I also find it so user friendly (even as a beginner) and it’s easy to explain and train clients for a smooth transition.

Moreover, WordPress is flexible and the possibilities are endless. There are literally thousands of themes and plug-ins (some free, some paid for) to ensure you design a truly bespoke and unique website every time.

Themes

This leads very nicely to the actual topic of my blog. Themes… There’s soooo many of them and when you start out with a blank canvas, you often don’t know where to start. It can be quite daunting actually especially as a theme dictates the look and feel of your entire website.

I often start by doing some simple Google research i.e. top 10 themes for a hotel website etc. It’s a great way to narrow down your options.

WordPress has a variety of free themes available and you can also find some great paid for ones. It’s often relatively cheap, between £30-£100 – just double check the cost is a one-off and not a yearly subscription.  Theme Forest is a very popular website to find WordPress themes.

You can also start with a free theme and then upgrade to the Pro version for more options. I often do this actually and I’ll explain why in a bit.

mesmerise

One-pagers or scrolling websites are very ‘in’ lately. They are a great solution for people or businesses who want small yet sleek looking websites. They particularly work well for static (i.e. none e-commerce) websites and for those who don’t necessarily have that much content to share.

I’ve now finished my third one-page website and I’ve used the same theme every time. It’s called Mesmerise and it truly lives up to its name. It has a build-in drag & drop feature (no need for Elementor for example) which basically allows you to build the entire website on the front end. There are loads of gorgeous layout options available, including in the header (or hero as they call it).

I’m not going to explain too many more details as this might get a little too ‘technical’ or boring for some but do check out my portfolio to see all my websites or the ones built using Mesmerise: Silver Executive & EQT Ventures’ CEO summit.

For Silver Executive I used the free version. It’s absolutely enough to built a modern and professional looking website. The only downside to the free version is the fact that you can’t change font type and size and more importantly colours. If your client/company has strict brand guidelines, this isn’t ideal.

For EQT Ventures I used the paid for version for this exact reason. It gives you even more layout and design options but more importantly, it allows you to change colours, fonts and more.

Basically, it’s mesmerising 😉

I hope this helps anyone starting out with WordPress a little bit. Feel free to comment or ask any questions below. Or do share if you think this may benefit anyone else!

Thanks,
Babs

 

Let’s talk optimisation

Last week’s blog post discussed the importance of website responsiveness. This week, I wanted to talk about something equally important: website optimisation.

According to research, we’re a very impatient generation and if a website doesn’t load fast enough, we basically leave. And when I say fast, I mean fast: apparently, any longer than a three second wait and we go somewhere else!

Basically if you want to retain as much traffic (and ultimately business) on your website as possible, ensure it’s optimised. And that counts for every page on your website.

So what can you do to make your website faster?

1. Optimise your pictures: Before you upload any images, ensure they are as small as possible while still being of good quality. If you’re not a graphic designer and don’t know how to do this prior to uploading them, download a WordPress plug-in. There’s many available but I recommend (and use) Smush and Image Optimiser.
2. Avoid embedding large video files: These are heavy and will massively impact your website’s loading time. I recommend uploading these onto a streaming website like Youtube.  I’m currently working on a website which has a video background on the homepage. It’s such a large file that I couldn’t even upload it even if I wanted too. So instead, I uploaded it onto Youtube and it works beautifully.
3. Clean up: Keep the back-end of your website tidy. If you don’t use any images anymore, delete them. Any de-activated plug-ins? Delete them. Any un-used themes? You got it, delete!

As some of you may know, I only design WordPress websites, but I’m sure many of these rule apply to other platforms as well.

Enjoy,
Babs

 

Is your website responsive yet?

I may have talked about this before but this is so important I will talk about it again (and again). ‘It’ being your website’s responsiveness.

Responsive  web design  means that your website will adapt to the user’s environment and load seamlessly on any device, operating system (iOS or android for example) and even web browser (i.e. Safari, Chrome etc). Whether you’re on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, you should see websites load quickly and proportionally (or appropriately) for the device.

It’s no secret that the majority of website traffic nowadays is from mobile devices. In fact, according to my website‘s Google analytics, on average 90% of visitors come from a mobile device.

This means that if my website wasn’t mobile friendly, I’d lose out on so much potential lucrative traffic!

So basically, ensure your website is responsive as there’s no point even having one if you can’t view it on the vast array of mobile devices out there.

A great little discovery I made recently is Am I Responsive? You enter your own website’s URL (i.e. address like www.golddesignandcomms.com) and it will show you how it renders on different devices like a desktop, laptop, smartphone and tablet.

Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss your web design needs.

Next blog post we’ll cover some other important website attributes like loading time.

Cheers,
Bx