Improving Your Portfolio Website
A website design company can help bring your dream website to reality. Designing and building your personal website can be challenging. You need to balance the expectations of stakeholders and can often come across obstacles which prevent your ideas from coming to life.
One of the major problems faced when you are trying to design and build your own website or blog is losing perspective of what will bring the most value to your target market or audience. This kind of tunnel vision can be detrimental to your website’s design. Taking a step back and thinking about these tips could help. Firstly, think in shades of gray. Design in a grayscale visual design then carefully add photography, colour and design elements one at a time to prevent your finished site looking over-designed.
Secondly, bury your social media icons. After spending time getting visitors to your site why are you sending them straight away to social media channels? Bury these icons in the footer. Your goal should be to keep visitors on your site and engaged with your content – i.e. reading or shopping. Social media should send people to your site, not vice versa.
Finally, step back from your computer. Great design starts with great planning. Plan your site on paper or a whiteboard to help you visually see the finished layout and structure. Creating a website to aid your career progression from scratch isn’t easy. However, a careful plan will make it a lot easier.
Why Web Fonts Matter
A well-defined webfont is essential for creating the right impact on visitors to your career site. As any website design company will tell you, web font hierarchy is often more instrumental in communicating your message to visitors than a sophisticated layout. This is why web designers carefully and cautiously choose the right font for a site.
A digital agency will begin by looking at adding web fonts to your overall corporate style guide. This ensures that your website has the same governance as other external materials such as corporate collateral and documents do. A digital agency will often start by looking at Google Fonts. There they will find a suitable web font for your site and define its use for your corporate style guide. The website builder you use will, of course, impact the fonts available to you.
Next, think about your font size. Typography is very important to web design. Text can be hard enough to read on a computer, tablet or smartphone screen. Help your readers by making important messages stand out. One way to do so is increasing font sizes on headings and important blocks of text. Think about increasing the size of your standard text too.
Next use the squint test. To quickly see which text and messages are prominent on a page back away from your PC and squint. As it becomes blurry only more prominent features will be legible. These features are those which a first-time visitor may notice when scanning your page or site. Is this your most relevant or important content?