When you’re designing a website, you don’t have to sacrifice creative flair to keep things professional.

Ensuring your website has a professional yet creative design can be a big project, offering you opportunities and challenges at the same time. Fortunately, with the right web design in Toronto team on your side, you can offer your users a website that sets your brand apart while still maintaining the feel of a pro in your industry. Keep key design points in mind so your website reflects your company or organization in a way that’s artistic yet befitting.

Keep your homepage clean

Most users don’t read every single world on a website. Instead, they scan your pages, looking for specific keywords or text. Keep these known behavioral patterns in mind–they mean you need to appeal to emotion instead of word count. So, while you can get creative on the homepage, it can’t be at the expense of space. The less there is on your homepage for a person to read, the more likely it is that they will be able to quickly process and evaluate what they are seeing, and this also makes it more likely they will do whatever it is you want them to do once they’re there.

Make way for clean navigation

Website navigation is one area where you simply can’t break the mold. If users feel as if your website is a wild goose chase, they’ll leave and visit the website of someone else instead. When you have solid navigation in place, you’ll also be helping the major search engines with the indexing of your content, and this is crucial to your rankings in the search results for terms connected to your brand, product or service. The higher your website appears on the search results, the more traffic you’re likely to see.

At the minimum, your logo should link back to your homepage–this is a common standard that visitors are used to seeing, so they’ve come to expect it. A menu is usually found near the top of the website, and it’s structured by the importance of the sections. If you’ve decided to go with long-scrolling for some flair, consider an anchor menu so viewers have the ability to go right back to the bottom or top of your website or to specific sections. This will avoid frustrating users who aren’t sure where they are on a webpage. Last but certainly not least is your footer, which is often the very last thing people see on your website. This can include a condensed version of your menu, additional important items–such as a FAQ–and your social media link icons.

Don’t leave anything about your website to chance. Today’s user expects more now than ever, so if your website doesn’t measure up to the competition’s, your brand or organization won’t, either. Contact a professional agency focusing on web design in Toronto so your website has a professional appearance and feel with more than a hint of style.