Build Your Own Website – 6 Tips to Looking Professional
By Carolyn Wilson

These days, anyone can create a website with little to no web building experience with the tools available, but many fall into the trap of not building a good impression with their website. What you save upfront on design and development costs could be costing you business in the long run, simply because you don’t look like you could do your ‘real’ job reliably.

Here are some points that will help you maintain a professional looking website, and pull in more business:

1. Maintain a consistent ‘look’: Branding is another term for it. Throughout your website, and throughout your entire business image (stationery, signage, advertising, documents), you should offer the same look so that people can get to know you at a glance, and know that they are in the right place. Your site’s banner is key for this, and should contain your logo, buy line, colours and suitable imagery.
2. Know your customer: Remember your website is for your visitors, not for you. Keep in mind what they would want to see and know about you. They need to feel you are serious about them getting what they want.
3. Keep it clean: There is no need to add flashy headings and numerous colours and font styles to text to make a point stand out. Simply bold it or bullet point it. If you have 20 important items you want to jump out on the page, maybe you should re-think your content – cut it back; refocus on what you want to say.
4. Keep it simple: Your content needs to get straight to the point. Use easy to read language. Avoid fluffy ‘poetry’ or getting off-track. It’s easy for a site visitor to think ‘too hard’ and move on to another site that will quickly present what they are looking for.
5. Avoid poor quality images: If you need images in your content, make sure they are crisp and clear and not distorted. You are best to have NO image than a poor one. If your website building tools don’t offer image editing for resizing or cleaning up, you can find some reasonably priced image editing tools on the internet.
6. Get some feedback: Find some ‘honest’ friends to have a look over your site’s visual impression and how it reads. You’ve been looking at the site a lot, and putting some loving effort into it. You need new eyes to look at it for some helpful comments.

Once you set up and maintain a habit of keeping your website clean and simple, updating your content will actually become an easy task. There is no need to keep re-inventing the wheel.

Presenting a professional, reliable image on the internet can be easy, if you have the right website building and management tools.

Carolyn Wilson is the owner of TrafficZone, offering an online ‘build your own website’ tool with domain name and web hosting services to Australian businesses. She has over a decade’s experience in website design and production.

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