How to Make a Website Look Professional

Are your sales slipping or is your new business struggling to get off the ground? If the answer is “yes”, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. But how do you fix it?

The solutions could be as easy as making some changes to your website. If your company website looks like something a high schooler made on Geocities back in 1998, you’re in need of an upgrade.

Are you guilty of owning a hideous website that’s keeping your sales down? Read on to find out how to make a website look professional. Let’s get started.

Make It Attractive

Don’t feel bad. Lots of businesses have ugly websites and they don’t realize it. There are several reasons this can happen.

• You got someone in house to build your website and they’re inexperienced or you didn’t pay them enough
• You hired a graphic designer who promised more than he could deliver
• Your website looked great 10-20 years ago but you haven’t made updates
• The creation of the website was rushed and never fully completed

How can you fix some of these issues?

Strategies to Beautify Your Website

The first thing you need to do is look at your website and figure out why it doesn’t look professional. It could have to do with image sizing, annoying pop-ups, too many ads, or it could be as simple as having the wrong color and font schemes or having them in the wrong places.

Ask yourself this: Does your website align with your brand? What about your mission and values?

Canva has a nice blog post on the subject of fonts to use for your site. It should give you some ideas on how you can use the right font scheme to increase your brand image.

As far as color schemes go, you should look into how colors affect the people that look at them. There is psychology you should adhere to. Different colors make people feel different things.

Does this mean you should completely abandon your current scheme? No. As an example, if yellow is one of the main colors for your brand, consider using it as a trim color rather than filling up someone’s screen with a shade that hurts the eyes and distracts from your content.

There is definitely too much of a good thing. This is especially true with images, which include both ads and ones your team uploads to the website themselves.

On top of this, Google and other search engines will punish you if your website takes too long to load because your image sizes are too big. Full-screen opt-in boxes are something else that can get you penalized. Not only that, but people hate them.

There are other options for promoting something on your website. Opt-in boxes aren’t evil. But you have to consider the size and when the pop-up is shown to your customer or reader.

Build a New Website

If your website is old and needs an upgrade, it might be a better idea to scrap the old site and make a new, more professional-looking one.

Know exactly what you want if you decide to go this route. Do some research on your competition to see what they’re doing right and what you think you can improve on.

You don’t want to do a copy/paste job, but these days people spend a lot of money to figure out what’s going to get the highest number of customers in the door. This includes your website, which is going to be a big part of marketing and sales for your company.

Choosing to hire someone for this job might be in your best self-interest. Going this route has a lot of pros, but a lack of communication is the biggest con. The designer you hire needs to know what you want. Give them honest feedback as the work progresses, so the finished product is perfect.

Work On Your Homepage

When potential clients or customers first come to your website and see your homepage, what do they see? Is it a bunch of jargon or baseless claims? Do you direct people to helpful information? Or do you make sure that you help people right away?

It’s a good idea to find ways to entice people when they land on your homepage. Tell them what you do and how it helps solve their problems.

The first thing they should see is something like “This is who we are, what we do, and here’s how it all works”. There are several strategies you can employ right on your homepage to help drive customers or clients down the funnel.

Use Testimonials

Do you have a portfolio of happy, satisfied clients? Reach out and ask them about their experience with your brand. 

Post these positive reviews right on your homepage. The real key with testimonials is for these happy folks to say how your business helped them with their specific problem. Another good idea is to include a picture and a name so people will know these testimonials come from a real person.

One popular method that works really well is to use a scrolling feature with your website so your audience can flip through and read their reviews. When they get to the end, the cycle starts over, making it appear that there are an infinite number of testimonials.

Include Professional Pages

Every professional website has professional pages like an About Us, Contact, as well as a Privacy and Disclaimer page. If you sell your own product or service, you should also have a page dedicated to your Return Policy.

When people visit your website, having these pages help to prove to your audience that you’re a reputable business that’s trustworthy and an authority in your space.

This is especially important for folks who run niche or authority websites. There are a ton of terrible websites out there that post fake reviews and product comparisons that they have ripped off from reputable websites. 

While this worked for several years, consumers have wisened up and Google is now punishing people who build and manage these awful digital properties with their most recent update.

Another update comes into play with these pages. The medic update increases the rankings for creators with expertise in their field. For example, if you were trying to promote a bunch of shady supplements on your website and you had no credentials mentioned, you were punished.

However, if you were a certified yoga instructor with the focus of your website being yoga, you likely got a boost if you posted your credentials in your About Me section. You can promote any kind of health and wellness product you believe in at this point because you’re a proven authority in your niche.

Improve Your Site Architecture

Site architecture isn’t nearly as complicated as it sounds, but it is really important. It’s all about creating the right menus for the right content.

You want to make it easy for people to find the content they want. It’s equally important for search engines so their crawlers can properly index your website. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Some websites prefer to have their most attractive content at the top of the page.

The professional pages are located in the footer.

Other businesses prefer to keep everything at the top. That’s the model Forge and Smith prefer. Check it out:

If you’re using a WordPress theme, some of them, especially free ones, will not have the capability of giving you multiple menus at the top of your page. So you want to be strategic about what goes where.

Focus on putting the most relevant menu items on the top page and if you want to include something in your footer, place professional pages there.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

More and more people surf the web on their phones. Because of this, Google has placed an emphasis on the attractiveness of your homepage on mobile as well as the desktop version.

Most themes and professional graphic designers keep this in mind when building. But every once in a while, something you want to do might look a little goofy. Before you publish or lock anything in place on your homepage or website in general, play around with the mobile version to make sure it looks professional.

Some Final Thoughts on How to Make a Website Look Professional

We want to stress that if you want to know how to make a website look professional, it’s not about any one thing. It’s the whole package, with each piece clicking into place to make a flawless finished product.

People want to buy a complete service or product. Being that your website is going to be the first impression for a lot of people, you want to give them a good idea of the quality of your company by showing them a quality homepage.

Thanks for hanging out and reading today’s post. If you enjoyed it, we recommend checking out this one on how to use social proof in marketing.

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