Elevate your website with these designer secrets: Confetti Hour Podcast with Renee Sabo
Like a lot of wedding pros & creatives out there, you might be thinking your website is “just fine” as-is, so why should you bother with “elevating” your website design?
Lemme tell ya; it’s not just about pretty for pretty’s sake.
What really makes for an effective website is the combo of strategy and good design.
Think about it: when we see a website with design flaws, when it looks like it hasn’t been touched in years, or even if it just looks amateur — it causes us to instantly make snap [negative] judgments about the business itself (whether we realize it or not).
We wonder things like… Do these people really know what they’re doing? Do they have much experience? Are they not very profitable/successful? Are they still in business?
The overwhelming majority of people determine whether or not they can trust a business purely on design.
That means first impressions are key to building enough trust with your visitors that they’d be willing to hand over their money to you.
It’s simple: If your website looks expensive, people will assume your work is valuable.
Now, that doesn’t mean your website actually has to cost a lot of money to build, but there are some very simple methods that designers use to make a website look more high-end — and I’m going to pass those along to you.
If you’re on the move, you can listen to my podcast interview with Renee Sabo, or read the tips below!
Finding the right balance of negative space on your website
I have reviewed hundreds of wedding business websites, and here are some of the most common issues I see with spacing:
Large areas of blank space
This one is pretty straightforward, yet I see it all the time.
Sometimes it’s caused by widgets that haven’t been updated, broken code, ignoring the mobile version of the site, or simply just overall neglect.
This is the quickest way to make your site look broken, and it’s one of the easiest things to fix.
Review every page on your website (on desktop AND mobile) to make sure there are no empty voids.
Elements crowded too close together
On the flip side, there are a lot of business owners who feel like every nook & cranny of the website needs to be chock-full of “value”.
But quite the opposite is true — when we give each important piece of content its own breathing room, it allows our eyes to pause and absorb the information.
And if you’re spending time writing copy, carefully choosing images, and creating calls-to-action, you want people to actually pay attention and not be overwhelmed by information overload.
Right?! Right.
It may feel a lil’ scary, but try adding just a bit more space in-between elements than you think necessary and chances are, you’ll have a more designery-looking site. ;)
Text on the page is too wide
Sometimes there isn’t enough space on either side of the page.
Let’s say you have a text box with a few sentences of copy.
Generally you don’t want to have that text span the full width of the page, forcing people to drag their eyes all the way from the far left side of the screen to the far right.
It may sound dramatic, but this is actually not a comfortable user experience!
Plus, when you create more narrow columns, you’ll see a difference in the professionalism of the design, too.
I recommend browsing through the Squarespace templates and take note of how much they have boldly utilized negative space to create a designer look. (And if you decide to purchase a subscription with them, you can use my affiliate code BEJ10 at checkout for 10% off!)
Creating a strong presence with the right fonts
Fonts are probably the thing that can have the biggest impact on the personality of a website design.
They also have the potential to be a DIY-dead-giveaway when done wrong.
It can be tricky to choose the right typefaces for your brand, so let me share some criteria you can use when reviewing your website.
Hint: It’s not always about choosing trendy or unique fonts, either. You can totally make a MASSIVE impact with the most basic of impact, if you follow the design principles I’ve laid out below!
Clarity: Is your text very legible?
Oftentimes business owners (or admittedly, their designers) will prioritize uniqueness over legibility, but that’s a big no-no for user-friendliness.
If your website isn’t user-friendly, no one will… you know… use it! (Aka no one will fall in love with you or hire you.)
So make triple-check that all the fonts you use are legible.
Take into account poor eyesight, the weight and size of the text, the colors, and the ‘fanciness’ of the typeface.
And if it’s not a super legible font (such as script/calligraphy) but you’re just dyyying to use it somewhere, I totally get it. Just use it sparingly and only for accent text / flourishes. Not for important information.
Consistency: Are you using the same fonts throughout?
Even if everything is legible, you don’t want your website to be a mess of ten different fonts — or a different font on each page.
Pair it down to just 2-4 fonts. For example: A paragraph font, a heading font, and maybe an accent.
Then make sure you’re using them in the exact same way on every page so that there’s uniformity.
That means all paragraph text should have the same font, size, and weight. All major headings should look the same, all subheadings should look the same, and so on.
This may seem like unnecessary attention to detail but remember, your website will look more professional as a result and professionalism = trust.
Contrast: Is there visual interest between the fonts you’re pairing together?
Something designers do to build logic into a design is create a visual hierarchy.
That means making it clear that your headings are more important than your paragraph text, or that your Heading 2 text is more important than your Heading 3.
How is this done? By creating distinct visual differences between them.
For example, if you are placing Heading 2 text right above some Heading 3 text, you wouldn’t want the styles to be too similar, because it tends to look like a messy mistake.
You’d want to create some sort of contract between them to set them apart.
Maybe your Heading 2 style is Helvetica in a larger size and thinner weight, while your Heading 3 is Helvetica in half the size and double the weight.
Or maybe one’s hot pink, and the other is black. Or one is a serif font and the other is a sans-serif.
Using clear contrast with your fonts will make your design look more intentional!
To see tons of visual examples and how to apply these design rules, see this blog post.
And here’s a tutorial on how to browse different fonts included with your Squarespace website.
Designing a unified color scheme for higher impact
Another element that really sets apart the elevated websites from the amateur is a tight color scheme.
And the high-end effect is amplified when everything follows that palette — from the logo, to the backgrounds, to the text, to the images.
There’s something about sticking to a strong color way that communicates confidence, and causes your business to automatically appear more expensive & trustworthy.
If you look at some of the most high end wedding photographers out there with the most impressive brands and websites, they are using consistent color themes in their work and sticking to them as much as possible. They aren’t posting every image from every wedding they’ve ever photographed. This helps their brand look polished and established.
Take for example:
Katelyn James sticks to light neutrals, blues & greens, with light pink accents
KT Merry uses a combo of black & cream with a variety of muted, pastel colors
Thierry Joubert uses dark, moody neutrals with pops of red
Amy & Jordan use peaches and greys with blue accents
I think the easiest way to achieve this is to pick a light neutral, a dark neutral, a main color and a minor accent color.
My favorite way to craft a custom color palette is to plug an image you love into the Adobe Color “Extract Theme” tool!
If you’re struggling to narrow everything down to one color palette, try using neutral colors for your website design, and then create a different palette of images on each page of the website.
So maybe on the Home page, all the images have blue accents, but on the About page, they have orange accents. This can still be an awesome designer-level choice and make your website look very elevated!
Bonus tips for elevating your website experience
Make your content easily skimmable
If your text isn’t easy to consume, then it’s just wasted real estate.
And in the digital age, we are each visiting over 130 web pages every day! Yepp. So I hate to break it to ya, but people just don’t want to read long paragraphs of text.
Some great ways to break up the information are:
Incorporating headings
Using bullet points
Making paragraphs just a few sentences max
Highlight certain words or phrases with color or bolding
Create a custom error page
This way when someone inevitably stumbles upon a broken or outdated link to your website, they are still met with a consistent brand experience instead of an ugly 404 page. There’s so much missed opportunity to keep people engaged on this page!
More on that plus creative examples here!
For photographers: Offer clients a style guide on your website
If you shoot engagements, families, boudoir, branding, other other portraits; it’s so helpful to include a style guide page in your footer!
You can give them tips on choosing outfits & accessories, hair & makeup, choosing locations, coming prepared, and general expectations!
This accomplishes two things:
It gives your clients a more valuable, high-end experience from the get-go
It helps them choose colors that work well with your style, which makes it easier to have brand consistency going forward
Want more website tips like these to your inbox?
Hey there! Don’t leave without checking out these other helpful web design posts :)
