How to Liven Up Your Dull Website

How to Liven Up Your Dull Website

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A dull website can be a major turnoff for potential customers, causing them to quickly move on to more visually appealing and engaging sites. In order to make your website more attractive and keep visitors interested, you need to liven it up by implementing simple yet strategic changes such as using better fonts, high-quality images, and appropriate colors. Delving into this topic, we shall recommend a couple of changes you could make to your website to overhaul its dull appearance.

1. Use Eye-catching Colors

Colors serve as the emotional undertone of your website, setting the stage for the user’s experience. The hues and shades you choose are a silent dialogue between your brand and the visitors, influencing their perceptions and actions. If you use bold, bright colors with stark contrasts, for instance, you can instill a sense of excitement and energy, making your website feel dynamic and action-oriented.

On the other hand, opting for softer, neutral tones can emanate a serene and tranquil atmosphere, which may be ideal for brands that want to emphasize comfort or introspection. Be strategic in your color selection, aiming for a palette that embodies the ethos of your brand and resonates with your target audience. Don’t shy away from experimenting with various combinations of shades and hues to find the perfect balance.

While it’s advisable to seek professional design services for your site when selecting a color palette, you can use resources like coolors.co and Color Hunt to get some inspiration.

2. Add High-Quality Images

Images are the visual storytelling elements of your site. They exist to complement the colors and text on your website. High-quality, visually compelling images can elevate the user experience, making your site not just a collection of web pages, but a captivating digital narrative.

Carefully selected images can illustrate the essence of your brand, whether through detailed product shots or lifestyle imagery that contextualizes your offerings within a specific way of life or aspiration. A well-curated mix of both can provide a more rounded and engaging visual journey for your visitors, making them more likely to interact and convert.

Make it a point to incorporate images that are aesthetically pleasing. Align the images with your brand message and ensure relevant to the products or services that your business or organization offer.

There are several sites with a large selection of stock images. Sites like Unsplash, Vecteezy, Freepik, Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and many others. Images are offered either free with attribution or at a fee.

3. Make Navigation Simple and Intuitive

Intuitive navigation is the backbone of any website. Your users should be able to effortlessly traverse through your content. A well-structured, intuitive navigation system, complete with clear labels and understandable links, provides a roadmap that guides visitors to the information or products they seek.

Excellent navigation can enhance the user experience and fosters longer dwell times on your site, which can subsequently boost metrics like conversion rates and SEO rankings. So it’s paramount to prioritize your website’s navigation by keeping it simple, intuitive, and user-centric.

Design menus and clickable elements should be easily distinguishable. In addition to that, organize the layout in a way that naturally directs the user towards their goals. Your should aim to minimize the number of clicks required for a visitor to reach their intended destination in order to offer a seamless browsing experience.

It’s important to consult with a UX designer who can assess your site’s current navigation and make suggestions to improve it. If you’re working on a new site, a designer will come up with a design that has intuitive navigation from the get go.

4. Use Engaging Typography

Typography is core to making your site’s content legible and readable. It’s often considered the visual voice of your brand. The choice of fonts, sizes, and line spacings can significantly impact how users interact with and perceive your content.

A carefully chosen typography set can enrich your website’s visual appeal, making it not only beautiful but also more engaging. The fonts you opt for should encapsulate the personality and tone of your brand; for example, a sleek, minimalist font may be apt for a tech company, while a script font might better suit a wedding planner’s website.

Likewise, the text size should be carefully calibrated to ensure readability across various devices, from desktops to mobile phones. Typography, when done right, can breathe life into your website, underlining your brand’s identity while ensuring that your content is accessible and digestible.

You can look up fonts on Google Fonts or Fonts.com for inspiration.

5. Incorporate Video and Animation

Including video and animation content adds a dynamic layer to the design of your site. This type of content is capable of instantly capturing attention of visitors and invigorating a webpage.

Short, compelling videos can turn a static experience into a dynamic one, giving your visitors an immersive feel of your products or services. Inviting visual elements can break down complex ideas into digestible pieces, illustrate the utility or appeal of a product, and serve as an interactive platform to connect with your audience.

User attention is a precious commodity online and capturing it is paramount. Engaging multimedia content can set you apart from your competitors. However, it’s crucial to ensure that these elements are thoughtfully integrated, supporting rather than distracting from your overall message. Videos and animations can spice up your website, making it more memorable and interesting to users.

Long-form and short-from videos from your social media (Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram Reels etc.) like product previews, customer testimonials, tutorials, etc. can be easily embedded and reused your site without having to create extra site-exclusive video elements. Additionally, you could animate how things like text and images appear on your site as users scroll by them. Lots of different attributes of these elements like size, color, movement, etc. can be animated in several ways so don’t be afraid to experiment.

6. Focus on User Experience

Focusing on User Experience (UX) design is like laying the foundation for a building; it’s essential for the stability and functionality of the entire structure. An excellent UX ensures that the interaction between the user and your website is as fluid and pleasant as possible.

It encompasses several aspects, from clear and intuitive navigation to the ease of filling out forms and clicking buttons. Moreover, as users today access your site from varied devices, optimizing your website for a variety of screens—from desktops to tablets and smartphones—is not just a bonus but a necessity.

Good UX makes sure that visitors have a seamless, enjoyable experience irrespective of how they access your site, thereby reducing bounce rates and enhancing engagement. Prioritizing UX is not merely an aesthetic choice but a strategic one that can have a direct impact on the success and effectiveness of your website.

Conclusion

Livening up your dull website can help to increase engagement, drive conversions, and build customer loyalty. You can inject life into a plain site by using eye-catching colors, high-quality images, simple and intuitive navigation, engaging typography, video and animation, and focusing on UX. Don’t just settle for a subpar site that may not capture your user’s attention, transform your dull website into a lively and engaging space that visitors will love.

Looking to spruce up your website, get in touch with Guideship to help you achieve your product dreams. Reach out to use on our contact page.