GUIDE

7 Ways to Make Your Website

Look Professional and Improve
Your Site's Credibility
by Mai Knoblovits

artisanthemes.io
https://artisanthemes.io/
Every little thing in your website is there to help tell your brand’s story. 

...or to destroy it. 

Colors, typography, images, copy, use of space, content layouts, navigation patterns. 

Use them wisely and you’ll get them to support your brand’s message. But when 
misused or loosely put over your pages, you might be affecting your brand’s 
credibility. 

So how do you get them to work in favor of your brand’s status?  

Here are 7 practical solutions that will make your website look professional and 
help your business get its trustworthy status: 

1. The images you use 

Let’s start with an easy one. 

The problem: 

I've seen many sites using the wrong images for their content. Do you know what I 
mean? 

Using outdated stock photos, logo files for posts' featured images (or featured images 
with a white background that makes it difficult to distinguish the limits of the image 
when needed), and low quality imagery which results in pixelated photos. 

Bet you're thinking "I have a couple of these". 

And I get it, it's not easy to find the right images. They cost a lot of money. You don't 
think the images you need actually exist. Or you don't have a permanent designer 
working with you… 

artisanthemes.io 
Or maybe those are just excuses. 

Images have a huge influence on the visitors' perception of trust. Therefore they must 
be chosen carefully. 

The solution: 

Fortunately, having good quality images on your site can be easy and even free. 

Here’s a list of handful resources that you can use to improve your site’s imagery. 

● A curated ​list of stock photo sites​ with high quality images for free. 

● Canva​, a free tool for non-designers. It’s an online app that will let you design 
all kind of graphic materials. It’s easy to use and comes with a huge collection 
of templates to start from. So you can have your design ready in a few minutes, 
without having any special skills or design knowledge. 

● Canva Photo Editor​, an online free tool from Canva to edit your photos. It’ll let 
you crop, resize, adjust values and add cool filters to your images. 

● Reduce Images​, an online tool to optimize your images for the web. 
To keep your site light and fast, images shouldn't exceed the 120-150KB. 
Upload your photos to this app and: select JPG, adjust width / height, choose a 
quality around 45%. Download the optimized images and use those in your 
site. 

● A post: ​4 Tips to Make Your Photos Look Better in Web Design​. If the images 
you need to use aren’t the best, here are 4 practical tips to make them look 
better. 

artisanthemes.io 
 2. Brand consistency 

The problem: 

Nothing says less-professional than an inconsistent use of your brand materials and 
visual elements. 

Imagine a chef that one day uses a top quality tomato can to make a pasta sauce and 
the cheapest one the day after, to cook the same recipe, just because he didn’t care 
much about purchasing the same ingredients. 

It’s not only that his food will sometimes be more tasty and sometimes less. No. 

The main problem is that it’ll taste ​different​ each day. Making it impossible for 
customers to: 

- Decide if they like his food or not 

- Know what to expect 
- Want to come back to the restaurant 
- Recognize this chef’s cooking when tasting his dishes or among other dishes 
in the market 

This untidy experience (one day tasty, the other day not) affects the possibility of 
building a sense of familiarity between the customer and the chef/restaurant. 

And familiarity is key to build trust and a solid relationship. It’s even more important 
than a top quality tomato. 

As a consumer, if you have to decide between a regular but consistent and familiar 
experience, and an experience that might be supreme but also might be the worst in 
the world… which one will you choose over and over again? 

artisanthemes.io 
The solution: 

Consumers will trust brands they are able to recognize. 

Keep coherence within your communication elements across all channels. This might 
exceed your website, but it’s surely a big part of it. 

● Use the same logo across your different channels or a limited amount of 
versions that look unified. 

● Maintain a color palette. And if you have a main color for your brand, care to 
use always the exact same hue. 

● Use no more than 3 font families and stick to them across all your graphic 
materials. 

● Maintain a tone of voice. Although every channel require its specific nuance, 
you can’t be someone else everytime you speak. Try to stick to your identifying 
voice. 

● Make sure the same values are present in every interaction with your users. 

● Try to convey the same messages with words and with imagery. If you say “I’m 
the best doing Y”, your images can’t say the opposite. Each element supports 
the other to convey your brand’s message. 

Tips to achieve all this: 

Create a Brand Style Guide 

To help you create and maintain a brand consistency the best thing you can do is to 
create a style guide for your brand. 

On this guide, you can include: 

- Your logo and how to use it 

- Your brand’s typefaces and when/how to use each one 

artisanthemes.io 
 - Your brand’s colors 
- What kind of images/photos your brand uses 
- Your brand key values and attributes 
- Your brand’s copy guidelines 

Remember we talked about Canva before? You can use one of Canva’s prebuilt Style 
Guides to create your own. ​Here you’ll find several templates​ ready to be used. I 
personally like the “Bulb Media” template, it’s clean and clear. 

Use the Brand Style Guide 

Creating a Style Guide it’s not enough, now you need to use it. Be sure you (and your 
team, if there’s a team) follow this guide everytime you create something for your 
brand. 

Keep a folder with ready-to-use versions of your logo and other brand assets 
Help your future self by having all the materials of your brand ready to be used. Have 
your logo in its original color, in white, in black, small, big, PNG, JPG, PDF. Have 
avatars ready, background images you know you always use, etc. 

3. The typography you choose 

The problem: 

Poor typography choices can make any design look unprofessional in seconds. 

Typography is the face of your content, if it’s not used carefully it directly affects your 
content’s credibility. 

Imagine a news headline about the stock market written with Comic Sans: 

artisanthemes.io 
 Government Urges Action After 
Stock Markets Plunge 
Or with this display font: 

Government Urges Action After 

Stock Markets Plunge 
Now look at it with a solid serif font: 

Government Urges Action After 

Stock Markets Plunge 
You get what I mean. It gets an instantaneous sense of credibility. Right? 

And it also positionates the author of the headline as authoritative and professional. 

a. Choosing the wrong font 

Choosing a font is like entering a candy store. Specially for non-designers that face 
the challenge of building a website. There are too many and some of them look so 
tempting. 

The most tempting ones are usually the devil himself. They might look really nice, but 
they’re actually pure sugar and at the end they’ll give you stomach ache. 

I’m talking about those fonts that you might think are cool because they look like a 5 
years old writing, or your grandma’s perfect calligraphy. But that’s actually not-cool 
when it comes to a professional design. 

Think of a famous brand: does it use that candy font on its website? Not really, uh? 

artisanthemes.io 
I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions. There are some beautiful typefaces that will 
stay professional despite their playfulness. 

But if you’re not experienced with working with typography, the best thing you can do 
to keep your site’s professional looks is choosing a safer font. 

b. Using too many fonts 

The second problem comes when there are too many typefaces inside the same 
design. 

It confuses the user, it creates a messy design and it makes it hard to keep a 
consistent brand. 

It says: “I wasn’t sure about which fonts to use so I put them all here”. 

The solution: 

● Stay away from candys. Choose more nutritive snacks (i.e., safer fonts). When 
in doubt, a classic Serif or Sans-Serif font will do a great job. 

● Don’t use more than 2 or 3 fonts inside the same design. Pick one for the 
headings, one for the body and maybe one more for little details if needed. 

● Rely on pre-made font combinations like the ones provided here: 

○ Best Google Fonts Combinations for a Modern Agency Website 

○ Google Font Combinations Ready to Use 

○ Trendy Google Fonts Combinations 

○ Beautiful Web Type 

● Read these essential ​tips on choosing and combining fonts​. 

● If you like the typography you see on a website, you can use a tool like 
Fontface Ninja​ to figure out which fonts it’s using, and try those or similar ones 

artisanthemes.io 
 on your website. Fontface Ninja also offers a list of popular fonts used over the 
web. If you use one of those you’ll be pretty safe. Check them out ​here​. 

4. Your content and the language you use 

The problem: 

Content is the meat of any website and one of the most important components of 
online marketing. 

Many website owners make the mistake of starting a website by randomly throwing 
elements over a homepage. Listen, children: that is not how you create a website 
when you’re trying to achieve something. 

There must be a content strategy before that. One that guides the design and no the 
other way around. 

Think of what you want to say to the users and how you want to say it to them. 

But that’s not all. Your content should help your website’s trustability and if you’re not 
a copywriter that may sound hard to achieve. 

The solution: 

Here are some tips that will help you write more professional content for your 
website: 

● Know what you’re talking about and show it with clear ideas and proper 
language. 

● Make your content relevant to your audience. 

● Be honest about your products and proposition. 

artisanthemes.io 
 ● Explain the value behind what you do and talk about how you work. 

● Be authentic. 

● Be accurate with the information you provide. 

● Be up front with prices and services plans. 

● Be engaged with your cause. 

● Mention sources when needed. 

● Check for misspellings and grammatical mistakes. 

● Add an About page. 

● Provide contact details/channels. Make yourself reachable. 

● Add corporate pages such as Terms & Conditions or Privacy Policy if needed. 

● If you have on-site advertising, place it wisely within your content and make 
clear what’s your content and what’s an ad. Don’t confuse people making them 
think they’re about to click on a regular link without knowing it’ll take them to 
an ad page. 

5. Proving your expertise or your product’s 

effectiveness 

The problem: 

As social creatures, we –humans– need the approval of others –also humans– to get 
confident about the decisions we make. 

It’s not enough to think a product may be good for us. We also crave to hear from 
others that the product was good for them too. 

artisanthemes.io 
That’s why we almost never book a hotel, try a new restaurant or buy new technology 
without first reading reviews from real users. 

The logic is simple: if other people used this and they were happy with it, why won’t I? 

 
50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong - 1959 

There’s even more: social proof will not only make potential customers feel 
comfortable about the buying decision but it will probably also make them feel more 
satisfied about the product after purchasing too. 

And that could be the boost that your website is missing. 

The solution: 

There are many tactics to apply social proof to your website. Whatever technique you 
decide to use, keep it authentic and targeted to your audience’s needs. 

All of these will increase your site’s credibility: 

● Testimonials 
Collect real feedback from your users. If you don’t have any, you can send 

artisanthemes.io 
 them an email asking them for quick feedback on their experience with your 
product or service. 

● Ratings / Reviews 
If you business is present in sites that collect reviews, or you have an inhouse 
ratings system, showcase the most useful reviews on your site.  

● Past works 
If you’re promoting a service, make sure you display your current or more 
important works in your site. This usually works well for designers, 
photographers, architects, copywriters, consultants and freelancers. 

● Clients’ logos / Badges 

Showcase companies you’ve worked with or companies that support you. 

● Clients’ stories 
Want to show that you care for your clients? Having a section where clients tell 
about their experience with your brand will not only make potential buyers 
want to hire you but also make them feel that you care about each one of your 
clients. 
It can be a written story, a video, whatever you feel that works. 

● Awards / Certifications 
If you’ve won awards or have certain certificates that support your work, 
showcase them on your site. Be careful not to sound too braggy if it’s not 
opportune. 

● Media mentions 
Media mentions give your brand a huge legitimacy bucket. If you were 
mentioned on a magazine, a blog or any other kind of media you can consider 
posting it in your site. It can be in the form of a testimonial from that article, or 
maybe just a badge saying “As seen on…”. 

● Influencer endorsements / Experts testimonials 

If others’ experiences give your product a sense of credibility, imagine what a 

artisanthemes.io 
 testimonial from an influencer can get you. You can try requesting feedback 
from an influencer or an expert by sending them your product. Make sure this 
kind of testimonial is placed in your homepage. 

● Numbers​ such as quantity of subscribers, followers, users, shares, etc. 

It’s the logic of the crowd: if so many people are subscribed to your list or 
following you in social media it probably means you’re good and I need to be 
there too. Users won’t want to miss something everybody’s being part of. 

6. Simplicity and white space 

The problem: 

One of the most common errors that happen to non-designers is creating overloaded 
and “dirty” designs. 

Or in other words, putting a lot of elements inside a small space. 

This not only makes your design less readable and less enjoyable for the user but it 
also creates the impression that is less professional. 

Space is defined when an element is placed inside it. What’s not an element, the 
“non-used” space, is called the white space or negative space. The space that you 
intentionally leave blank (not specifically in white color, though). 

A good balance between positive and negative space will help: 

● Reduce noise 

● Organize the information 

● Clarify the information 

● Emphasize the important stuff 

artisanthemes.io 
 ● Give your design a brighter and open feeling 

Apple is known for making excellent use of white space. As you can see, it helps to 
achieve a really modern, professional and top-level look. 

Apple’s website 

And it’s not that you have to do this with light colors exclusively. It can also be 
achieved with dark colors as well. 

artisanthemes.io 
  
Apple’s website 

The solution: 

● If you’re overloading every part of your website, think of how you can 
reorganize the elements and make room for white space. It’ll automatically give 
your eyes a more pleasant feeling. 

● Add more breaklines between you copy. 

● Don’t use two consecutives overloaded backgrounds. If one section has an 
image background or a pattern, maybe use a plain color for the subsequent 
one. 

● Don’t put your logo over a complicated background. Keep it clean. 

● If needed, use dark overlays on image backgrounds so the text on top of it 
stands out. 

● Don’t be afraid to keep a proper distance within elements. Unless you need 
them close to each other to show they’re very related. 

artisanthemes.io 
 ● With Artisan themes you can adjust the space between sections by playing 
with the ​Artisan Advanced Styles plugin​. Make good use of it! 

7. Overall good quality and user experience 

The problem: 

Imagine going to a job interview without taking a shower or getting dress for the 
occasion. Who’ll take you? 

Your website is at a constant job interview. Every visitor entering will review if you’re 
suitable for them or not. 

And this review happens in seconds. At the very first impression. Before they even get 
to understand what you do. 

So put on that metaphoric bow tie and be prepared to host your attendees.  

The solution: 

Quality of design is an indicator of a quality business behind. You can be the most 
professional nutritionist, but if your website looks bad and functions poorly few people 
will trust you and therefore dare to call you. 

So, all the tips mentioned in previous items plus: 

● Good quality media. We’ve talked about images, but it’s the also the same for 
all kind of graphics and videos. Make them worth it. 

● Good quality and organized information. 

● Clear navigation menu and a well structured content. People should know 
where to find what they’re looking for. 

artisanthemes.io 
 ● Mobile optimization. Sounds obvious, but anyway. Your site should be 
responsive and enjoyable from every device. 

● Have a SSL certificate activated in your site. It’s a must and it tells your visitors 
you care for their privacy. 

● Keep it up to date.  

○ Make sure your site matches current web languages and requirements. 

○ If you’re going to post on your blog once in a year: hide the dates, don’t 
let people think that your content it’s outdated. 

● In that matter, keep it timeless when you can: 

○ Don’t get too cozy with trends if you won’t be able to keep up. And if 
you do keep up, too many different languages will start inhabiting your 
website. Or you’ll find yourself in the need of modernizing your site too 
often. 

○ If you’ll use graphics that showcase device mockups, don’t use detailed 
and specific devices, they’ll soon be old and outdated. Maybe 
something more abstract or illustrative than figurative will be better. 

Grab a cup of coffee and go over this guide while browsing through your website. 

What elements can you improve according to the guide? Go through them one step at 
a time. 

Maybe this week you focus on your site’s imagery, and the week after that on its 
content. Then you can move to adjusting the typography and other brand elements to 
achieve a stronger consistency. 

By the end of the month you can add social proof elements where is worth it or add 
more white space where needed. 

artisanthemes.io 
Who’s website won’t look professional now? 

I bet not yours. 

–Mai 

P.S. I would love to see your site before and after these adjustments, make sure you 
share it with me by replying to this email. 

P.P.S. I mentioned some techniques that can be easily achieved with our themes for 
WordPress. Like adding testimonials or badges to your site, having a color palette and 
using good quality fonts, among several others. You can ​check them out here​. I’m 
sure you’re gonna fall in love with them. 

artisanthemes.io 
 Was this useful?
At Artisan Themes we really care for the websites you build and we
want you to succeed with your online presence as much as you.

Meet our WordPress themes

Modular WordPress themes for solopreneurs and businesses.

They’ll let you craft your site by stacking sections one on top of the other.
So you can build easily and get beautiful and professional results.

https://artisanthemes.io/wordpress-themes/
BROWSE THEMES

artisanthemes.io
https://artisanthemes.io/