Developing a new website, as we all know, takes a great deal of time and patience. It is also important that your content be presented in both a readable and easily accessible way, not just for the benefit of your visitors but to search engines too. To this end Host-Review has done a simple list of fifteen tips that could help your finished site stand out from the crowd:

1. Use a consistent colour theme.

Getting the colours of your site correct is imperative because it has such a significant impact upon readability. The worst mistake any designer can make is to pick clashing colours that cause visitors to squint or possibly even develop a headache. One classic example stems from using bright red or yellow text on a black background, which is appallingly unattractive and very difficult to read unless you get the tones just right.

The best advice is to pick no more than 2 to 4 complementary colours, using one for the majority of your theme, another for link highlights and the rest to help any navigation (menus) or specific content standout. Naturally you can use different shades of your chosen colours too, so long as they don’t clash and we recommend using darker variants at the top. Having darker colours in the middle of your page, when the top is lighter, can look very out of place.

Finally you should also consider how these colours and shades will look on different monitors, many of which are sold with differing gamma, contrast and brightness levels. Try to test your site out with several displays (especially laptops, which often have brighter screens) to see if the colours aren’t too soft or bright.

2. Use consistent font themes and sizes.

Much like colour, it’s also important to maintain a similar font style and text size throughout your site. Try to avoid using lots of different fonts as it can look unprofessional (pick just one for most of your content), while small text sizes can be difficult to read at higher resolutions.

In addition, line-height (e.g. 14px) is often fatally overlooked and without it sentences may appear clumped and be difficult to skim over with your eyes. This is an excellent CSS setting to use and we highly recommend it.

3. Keep your content fresh and original.

Make sure your site isn’t left to stagnate just because it’s not gaining a lot of initial visitors; becoming properly indexed by search engines and directories can take up to 8 months! Hence it is imperative that the site contain relevant and updated content, which should include using visual highlights (e.g. underline and bold etc.) to help important details stand out as search engines are known to look at this too.

However, you don’t need to go overboard with adding new content until the site has become well established, just try to keep it fresh and reasonably up-to-date.

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