Creative Themes Design

5 Design Tips to Make Effective Website Themes

01/08/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  1,065 views  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post  | 

It is all about effectiveness. While all website design templates are great, only few are effective. These effective templates help you achieve your online goals – higher conversions, higher click through rates, higher subscriptions are a few examples of goals.

What Makes a Theme Design Effective?

Here are 5 simple tips to design or even identify effective WordPress themes. Creative Themes Design makes effective WordPress Themes for small businesses, online businesses, MLM business owners, online affiliate marketers & individual bloggers who make money from ads.

1. Simple is Always Effective

A Clean & Simple design helps in many ways. It is good for getting the reader’s attention to any specific portions of the web page. It is also a good way to optimize your theme for search engines.

A simple design does not necessarily mean a standard layout (2 columns, 3 columns layout etc). You can break all the conventional design styles & yet keep it effective. Take a look at Lee.com & see how simple & innovative yet simplistic a design could be.

2. Font, Spacings & Backgrounds

Fonts, line spacings, letter spacings, the font size and the background colors all add up to a good readable web page. Use standard fonts (refer to the design standards) that can render well on all the popular browsers (read the web browser usage statistics).

Background & text color are important in an effective design. Several color combination of background & foreground make it easy for the eye to read & focus easily. Bold bright colors on the other hand draw attention to them & can be used only on certain important call-outs or messages.

The overall color scheme is important. Studies show that people associate an overall “green” color to “money” & are usually “tensed” on such pages that are predominantly green (thus conversion pages should not be green in color!).

Similarly, people psychologically associate “blue” with “peace” and tend to spend longer time on pages that are predominantly “blue”. You would see majority of e-commerce sales pages lean towards “blue”

3. Easy Navigation

Websites could have hundreds of pages on them. It is not possible to show all these hundreds of pages at the same time. This is where a website’s navigation becomes important.

An effective navigation would lead the reader on their thought process into all the relevant pages. Navigation also adds to search engine optimization. The best navigation creates any web page that is on click away from the home page.

Navigation is achieved through Menus on a website theme. In effective themes, a Menu list should not have more than 6 items & each having not more than 2 sub-levels of menus.

4. Combining Images & Text

Effective Themes are designed with an objective in mind & keeping the reader (or the customer) longer on your site is one of the main objectives. An effective theme creates a good combination of images & text to engage the reader.

Combining images & text also helps in optimizing your website for search engines. They both add to organic search results since images (their description, name, ALT tags etc) are indexed by search engines as much as the text.

Positioning images with text is also important. For example studies have shown, on conversion pages text & Buy-Now button lying on the right-side of product images result in higher clicks.

5. Less is More

This goes along with the first principle of Designing for Simplicity. An effective theme is centered around your main objective. If you are running an affiliate website, your theme should help you to convert more. So the main component of conversion page should be the “Buy Now” button & any text or image should lead the customer to it.

Similarly, if the theme is designed for individual bloggers who make money from ads, the ads should be designed in a way that they are close to the content & yet have most of them over the 600px fold for better CPM or CPC rates.