Having a quality website that can serve as an asset to you in your employment search takes a combination of many different elements. It can be hard to make your website stand out in the endless sea of the Internet. After all, there are more than 800 million registered host names across the Internet as of January 2014, according toTechMadeEasy. If you want to make your website pop against the backdrop of forgettable sites that are all the same, here’s a look at some tips and tricks that are sure to help you rise above the rest and create something that catches an employer’s eye.
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Choose Color Carefully
Choosing the right color palette for your site can make the difference between visitors who bounce immediately and visitors who connect to your ideas, products, or brand instantly. When choosing a palette, it’s much easier to predict what won’t work over what will. For example, if you have a motorcycle lifestyle site, chances are your visitors aren’t going to associate pink or pastel green with ruggedness. There’s no quick and fast guide to which colors you should use to create emotional impact in your visitors – after all, while the color green is associated with nature and frequently used to represent it, it is also associated with finances and money. Take some time to look over the colors used by websites within the industry that you are interested in and think about what their choice of colors says about their brand. Once you have a dominant color chosen consider building your site’s palette with analogous or triadic colors. Kissmetrics offers a thorough explanation of this aspect of color theory as it applies to website design.
Skip Bitmaps for Vector Art
The difference between a site that uses grainy bitmaps and one that uses high-quality vector drawings is almost immediately apparent to a visitor. Vector graphics scale without a loss of resolution, and in an era where your personal site may be viewed on everything from a monitor to a phone, that means a lot. Building your own buttons, themes, and even logos from a blend of hi-res photos and vector graphics is a great way give your website a professional, clean appearance, and it isn’t hard to do with the right resources. For example, Butterfly Creative’s logo is built with vector images and can be scaled to any size without a problem. If you were attempting to build this logo, it would be a snap to search through Shutterstock’s archive of photos and vector drawings of butterflies to find something that can be assembled in a unique way to give your website a personal identity. If you want to look professional, vector graphics can go a long way towards legitimizing your site.
Typography Matters
You wouldn’t hand an employer a resume in Comic Sans, and your website is no different. Choosing the right typography can go a long way in making your website communicate who you are as a employee to potential employers. Most fonts are broken into two huge groups – serif fonts and sans serif fonts. Serif fonts have small accents and give off a warm, traditional feeling reminiscent of a typewriter, whereas sans serif fonts have a crisp, modern feeling. Once you’ve chosen two or three fonts from the same general pool, use them sparingly. A font for headlines, a font for copy and third font for additional features should be your limit.
