September is already here and with it come fall colors, shorter days, and a new autumnal mood. Now is the perfect time for every small business owner to update your marketing and update your website, with an autumn restyle.
Moving with the season helps to keep your website fresh and relevant, and gives your visitors the impression that you offer something for the here and now.
In this post, we’ll not only introduce you to some timeless tips for giving any website an autumn makeover, but also give you some insights into some web design trends that are specific to fall 2021.
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1. Change up your images
This might sound basic, but you’d be amazed at how many websites overlook this step. The biggest visual cue you have at your fingertips are the images on your website. Use them.
Visitors are most likely to connect with what your website is offering if they see their own experience reflected back at them. In autumn, life tends to start moving indoors after a summer spent outdoors. Your images should reflect this.
Start with a seasonal landing page, then go ahead and refresh your website with new images of people in their homes, filled with reminders of the season, and themed around indoor activities. Alternatively, if it better suits your website’s theme, include images of the natural world transforming with fall colors.
Not only will these images help make visitors feel more at home, but the process of updating your images alone will help grab the attention of search engines, and help your SEO rankings improve.
2. Make your color palette seasonal
While the color scheme of your website might feel like something that is set in stone, smart web designers know that switching colors up through the year is a great way to make your website feel fresh.
All eCommerce website owners are comfortable with following hot product trends and you would be missing out if you didn’t extend that logic to aesthetic concerns.
Everyone is familiar with the rich and warm color palette of autumn, and introducing it to your website instantly tells your visitors that you’re bang up to date.
Autumn is defined by vibrant oranges, rich reds, and warm golden browns. While it’s obvious how you can incorporate these into your images, there are plenty of other spots around your website where you can apply your new palette.
Text, headlines, banners, backgrounds, buttons, forms, and other elements on your website can have their colors customized, and you should think carefully about how they can serve your new autumnal theme.
Remember the golden rule, though: pick one main color, then just two or three highlight tones. Make sure all the colors you choose work with each other before using them on your website.
3. Create hand-drawn elements
This is our first tip which isn’t exactly autumnal themed, but is an emerging trend for fall 2021.
Hand-drawn graphics never really go out of style in web design, but recently the technique has been enjoying a comeback and adding them to your website now will keep your website looking totally up to date.
Hand-drawn images, background, or features of pretty much any website element strikes a folksy tone, and is sure to draw visitors’ attention exactly where you want it.
If you’re not an artist yourself, you can find plenty of hand-drawn graphics on stock image websites, or you can commission your own at affordable rates from online artists.
If you’re already planning to update your images and color scheme to match the season, incorporating hand-drawn graphics in addition should be relatively straightforward.
4. Activate dark mode
Ticking both the trend and seasonal boxes, turning your website into dark mode both echoes the increasing darkness of the season, and helps refresh and revolutionize your website’s design.
Dark mode basically involves flipping the design of your website so that the background is dark, while images, text, headlines, and other features are colorful.
Editor’s note 📝 – The design concept behind dark mode is that it increases the contrast between the background and the content, helping text and headlines pop, and making it easy to highlight important elements.
As well as making your content seem more vivid, dark mode also helps screen save energy, as they don’t have to display anything in the areas of dark.
To make the best use of dark mode on your own website, be sure to include statement headlines, which are bright and bold.
This design idea can really help set the tone for the season.
5. Update your content
Any time of the year and whatever kind of website you have, the very best thing you can do to improve your website, keep it relevant, and increase your SEO ranking is to refresh your content.
In the context of this list, though, you can also use the opportunity to bring a taste of autumn into your website. The changing of the seasons is an obvious hook to get started with fresh blog content too.
As with your images, there are ways to talk about the season or seasonal activities in your text which will help visitors to connect with your website.
You might also consider using plays on words to attach some humor to the theme, like inviting visitors to ‘Fall for this great deal’.
Even if you’re a graphics-heavy website, text is still crucial to tell visitors what you’re about, and is always a helpful tool when redesigning a website.
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Ready to refresh your website?
If you already have a Zyro website, you’ll know that Zyro is the easiest platform for making quick changes to your website. Since everything is editable with our simple drag-and-drop builder, everything mentioned in this list can be achieved in minutes.
If you don’t have a website, or you built your website on a different platform, there’s still time to sign-up to Zyro. You can even import existing content from another website if you want to switch to our platform.
After that, you can try out all the tips we’ve suggested to get your website ready for autumn.
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