Web presence is a dynamic concept. You just can’t have the same design and layout for your website forever. Pretty much like garments, web design trends too tend to fall out of favor and new design ideas come in once in a while.
If you think it’s high time to revamp your WordPress website, here are some ideas and tips on where to start and how to do it.
Design Elements
The most obvious type of website revamp includes making changes to the design elements of your site. This can include trying out new fonts and colors, or even making drastic changes such as adding or removing segments and areas of your site.
In terms of fonts, your focus should be on readability. However, if you have not revamped your site in a long time, you might not be using web fonts. In such cases, it is best to turn towards Google Fonts or a similar service and look for clean and useful fonts that you can use on your site.
For colors, once again, you should focus on UI trends that in vogue nowadays. Loud colors are no longer preferred, and you can do some research by looking at color combinations of Material Design and even Metro UI, if you wish to.
Lastly, what about sections of your site? Nowadays, the trend is to move the widgets to end of the page, in the footer. This helps in putting the focus on your content. If you can afford to do without the sidebar, you should consider moving sidebar widgets to the footer.
Furthermore, if you are looking to add sliders to your site, make sure you add them in a manner that complements the nature of your site. For most businesses, a homepage slider should do just fine. However, if you are an artist or a performing band or someone from the creative field, you can use simple shortcodes to add sliders to your portfolio pages as well. More importantly, sliders are no longer restricted to photos — you can consider adding videos to your sliders as well. Check out Slider WD if you’re looking for an advanced slider plugin for your website.
Make Use of Photos
Images are the heartbeat of the internet nowadays. If the rise of social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest is anything to go by, you should know that people tend to react better to images as compared to just text.
Therefore, you should, by all means, have photos on your website. Using photos to tell a story is a cool idea — you can connect better with your audience and visitors and also show your brand’s worth and merits in a better manner.
You can make use of a simple plugin such as Photo Gallery to add photos and galleries to your site. The primary thing of importance here is that your galleries should be both user-friendly, intuitive as well as responsive so that even on mobile devices, your site looks great!
Represent Your Brand
Every website revamp should, either directly or indirectly, be meant to strengthen your brand’s online presence. Quite simply, after a revamp, your website needs to promote and showcase your business better than before.
One such method is to add your brand’s presence to your site in a manner that plays well with today’s trends. In this globalized world, more and more people are changing cities and living in different parts of the world. They may or may not be familiar with the routes and directions. Thus, it is very important that you add a map to your business, if yours is a physical business located in a specific office. Google Maps WD plugin lets you do just that.
Along similar lines, you can use the opportunity of a website revamp to interact better with your visitors. Showcase your work by means of “action” — if you are conducting any events, be it a workshop or a webinar or a meetup, add a calendar to your site to tell the world about it. What if you are attending a WordCamp? Why not use your own calendar to tell your loyal visitors that you will be present at the WordCamp?
If the above idea sounds good to you, the Event Calendar WD plugin is all you need.
Be Interactive!
Quite often, a website revamp tends to ignore some crucial but less visible sections of your site.
To begin with, do not forget to update your FAQ page. You may need to remove the obsolete queries, or add new ones, as the case may be. Similarly, if your team has had any changes in its members, why not modify the About Us page too?
To carry this further, it is often noticed that website revamps often forget about the contact page. You should ensure that you provide multiple channels of contact to your visitors. Speaking of that, you should use a dedicated form builder plugin on your site. Using temporary measures such as HTML code or a random plugin is always a bad idea — your form submissions may not get delivered, your users might receive error notifications, or your forms may simply look ugly and out of place.
To ensure that none of the above happens, make sure you use a great form builder plugin. Plus, add your forms in a manner that their design blends with that of your site. Most modern form builder plugins offer customizable and fully responsive forms. One such plugin is Form Maker.
Conclusion
By following the above steps, you can easily ensure that your website revamp adds more glory to your site and your business. Got any other measure or idea of your own? Share it in the comments below!