5 ways to brighten up your freelance website
Has it been a few years since you’ve given your website the attention it deserves? Hey, no shame here - small biz life is busy!
We’ve come a long way with web design, and a bit of text alongside some generic stock images just isn’t going to cut it anymore!
Your visitors needs to feel your brand, the heart of your business, in order to cut through all of the online noise and connect with you and your products and/or services.
This means personality! Creativity! Engaging elements! Lucky for you, that’s my speciality… here are five ways you can brighten up your website (and delight your website visitors):
1. Get colourful
And don’t be shy about it either! Pick one or two key colours and use them for backgrounds, headers, buttons, copy, shapes behind images… the sky is the limit.
If you already have established brand colours, amazing - use those! Otherwise, I love using a tool like Coolers to play around with complementary colours and find something that feels good.
Just make sure your text remains readable like with Molly Croft’s website.
2. Fabulous fonts & clever copy
Ugh, it’s just the perfect combination, isn’t it! Your font choice brings the personality (buckets of it, I hope) and your copy brings the attitude and overall vibe (I expect buckets of this full stop)!
You can find loads of incredible fonts to use from Google and Adobe (some free, some paid) as well as from various marketplaces and designers. Learn how to upload them onto your website here: How to add a custom font to a Squarespace website.
Don’t be afraid to be informal and show your personality through your writing, especially if you’re a service-based business - you want your visitors to get a feel of what it’s like to work directly with you or your team, much like CopyKate’s website.
3. Fun annotations
Think little scribbles, arrows and scrawled bits of text like you’re annotating your favourite book or your own journal. They break up your content and make your website feel that little bit more personal and authentic.
This detail is particularly great if your business has anything to do with writing or drawing!
Either way, it’s a fun and dynamic way to guide your reader along the page by adding your voice directly into the mix, like WhenI’m’s website.
4. Vibrant illustrations
Illustration is a wonderful way to tell a story and bring your copy to life.
Whether you’re showing how your business came to be or using it to explain how a product or service works, illustrations can really help give your visitors a more concrete sense of what you do.
It can also be a great shorthand if visitors don’t have time to read all your copy, so consider making it easily scannable a lá Bidaya’s website.
5. Eye-catching animations
What a way to spark joy into a usually static element! Moving elements like animations grab the attention and give your visitor more visual interest to keep them scrolling for longer.
Animations can also help to demonstrate key parts of what you do and how you do it to your visitors - it’s not just about keeping their attention!
Complex or simple animations work, like with Seb & Charlie’s website.
Every website on this list has been brightened up with one of my Happify Days - book a professional for your own brightening website makeover here!
Ready to get started?
Let’s see how I can help your business! Book in a free 30min chat and let’s meet!