How to Create a Beautiful WordPress Website

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) around. Its open source software is free to download and install on your website, and it has a massive amount of features that can be accessed via the WordPress dashboard. If you’re looking to create a beautiful wordpress website, then keep reading.

Find Your Niche

When we first launched Canva, we had no idea how popular our minimalist design template would become. It was originally designed for Instagram users who wanted something simple, yet effective. Since then, we’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people using our templates to create websites. While this is a very cool achievement, it didn’t come without cost.

We devoted countless hours to research and development, testing and debugging, and learning new software so that we could provide our users with the best possible service. The result of all this is that our design quality has improved significantly, and we now have to prioritize our limited resources to make sure we serve our users with the best experience possible. This is why we’ve decided to launch a website design specialist initiative.

Understand Your Site’s Audience

Websites are built to be accessed by a variety of people. Not only do you need to consider your target audience when choosing the content you’ll include on your site, but you also need to make sure that the design of your site is tailored to suit the majority of users. This is why we’ve decided to create a few different blogs specifically for different types of sites.

For example, if you have a fashion blog, you might want to consider creating a separate blog for men, women, and kids. Each of these blogs will have their own style and tone, and they’ll be optimized for the platforms they’re published on (i.e. Twitter vs. Facebook). This approach will not only help you to retain your audience, but it will also encourage them to subscribe to your feed so that they can keep up-to-date with your content.

Prioritize Mobile User Experience

If you’re reading this on a mobile device, then you’ll notice that the site is not only easy to navigate but also lightweight. This is because we’ve opted for a mobile first approach when designing Canva’s new website. When developing the new site from the ground up, we started by creating wireframes (i.e. digital mockups) for mobile users. This means that we made the decision to create a user-friendly site that will look good on small screens (i.e. phones) first.

Keep It Minimal

We’ve always been passionate about design, so when we heard that Google was launching a whole section of its own apps and websites devoted to design, we were immediately interested. This was the birth of Google Design Blog, which launched last year and has quickly become one of the company’s most popular properties.

As we mentioned above, we started by creating wireframes for mobile users. This is because a lot of people get frustrated when they’re browsing a website on a small screen and they have to click and tap and hunt for things on a page that doesn’t fit on screen. So instead of cluttering up the mobile page with extra content, we opted for a more minimalist approach.

Make Simple But Effective Calls To Action (CTAs)

An important factor that can impact a site’s conversion rate is its calls to action (CTAs). These are the phrases or words (e.g. subscribe, contact, etc.) that a website user will need to take action on (i.e. click or tap or enter text) to follow the steps of a purchase process or sign up for a newsletter.

Based on our experience, we’ve found that incorporating CTAs on your site can increase conversion rates by 7% to 11%. We’ve also found that having multiple calls to actions on a single page can lead to confusion, which in turn, leads to a lower conversion rate.

Optimize For Search

If you’re looking for increased engagement and higher conversion rates, then you might want to consider incorporating some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices on your website.

SEO is a method of bringing more website traffic to your site via the search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, and Yandex). There are several basic SEO practices that you can use to help your website gain more organic search traffic:

• create content that is valuable and useful to your target audience.
• make your page titles and descriptions relevant and concise.
• verify all the pages on your website with Google SEO
• make sure that your website has a Google SEO profile (i.e. sitemap), and submit your site to be reviewed by the search engines.
• incorporate internal links on your site to create a digital breadcrumb trail.

If you’re looking to create a beautiful wordpress website, then all these tips will help you make sure that your time and effort put in is all worth it.