You don’t have to be a professional web designer to create your website with WordPress. But you do want a site that looks like a professional created it.
If you’re inexperienced, building your own site can feel like an uphill battle. Just picking the right theme and successfully installing your first plugins are major achievements.
But good design is all about the details. Get the details right and instantly your site feels more professional.
Thankfully this doesn’t have to be hard – or take a lot of time. Today I’ll show you 4 quick ways to make your site look more professional.
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1. Get rid of “Just another WordPress site”
How many times have you seen “Just another WordPress site” in search results or when a link is shared on Facebook?
Too many, I’m betting.
That’s the default site tagline that’s on every new WordPress site. And if it’s still on yours, it’s doing your site no favours.
When you’re trying to entice people on to your site, whether that’s in search results or shared on social media, you have a really limited amount of space to work with. And if some of that space is taken up by “Just another WordPress site”, it’s wasted.
You’re using up precious words that could be spent on something actually relevant to your brand and interesting to your audience.
To change it, just click on Settings > General and change the Site Tagline to your own text.
You might also like: How to get started with WordPress
2. Add a favicon
Have you ever wondered how some sites get their logo to show beside their URL in web browsers?
That’s called a favicon. Adding a favicon used to involve faffing around with an FTP program. But these days WordPress makes it super simple.
Go to Appearance > Customize and upload your favicon to the theme customizer. WordPress calls it a site icon and recommends you use an image at least 512 x 512 pixels.
For best results, make sure it’s a bold and fairly simple image as it’s going to end up really tiny so fine details will be lost.
Tip: You can also change your site tagline in the customizer too!
3. Take advantage of page templates
Most themes come with several page templates, which gives you much more flexibility in laying out your content.
The default template is that used in the blog section of your site, so it’ll probably feature a sidebar and comments section. But those aren’t things you need on most pages. Your sidebar can distract users from your page content – not ideal on your sales page, for example!
These features are best left for your blog. So for the other pages in your site, check out alternative templates.
Most themes come with a full width template. And many also come with a specific template for your home/front page, to help you create an eye catching layout.
To explore your theme’s templates, check out the Page Attributes panel in the Add/Edit page screen.
4. Tidy up your menu
I wrote recently about the four pages every site needs, but chances are, your site will have more pages than that.
If you end up with a lot of pages, you mean you can end up looking like a jumbled mess period and rather than exploring all your content, users are likely to take one look and think “nope”.
To avoid confusing or overwhelming them, try to limit the visible options on your menu.
That doesn’t mean deleting some of your pages or hiding them away where people can only stumble onto them by accident. Just give your menu a little tidy up instead.
Try to organise the structure of your menu so that it leads users logically through your site towards your contact form or sales page. And if you have pages on a similar theme, can you group them together to make a drop down menu?
For example, I could have had menu options for each of my services: ‘Logo Design + Branding’, ‘Website Design’ etc. But my menu would have been massive! So they’re grouped together in a ‘Work with Me’ drop down.
To create a drop down menu, you simply drag one page under another so that it’s slightly indented, as shown here:
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These 4 quick tips will help you easily make a more professional looking site. And if you haven’t started building your site yet, grab my free email course. I’ll show you step by step how to set up a WordPress site, without the headaches.
Marisa says
I love the favicons! I had to dig to find this, so I wish I had seen this sooner!