How to design a mobile-friendly website: Freelancer edition

It’s time! You’ve decided to make the brave step in creating your website as a freelancer. Freelancers are entrepreneurs and creating a website is a great way to publish your name, demonstrate your work and showcase your artistic identity. The best types of websites are ones that ensure smooth navigation and easy browsing. The best way to do this is to adopt a mobile-friendly design. Just over half of all website traffic now occurs on a mobile device and that includes roughly 45% of all online shopping. Wishu has put together a list of tips on how to optimize your new site – best of luck! 

Buy your domain name(s) 

Whether you’re looking to design a website or not, as an entrepreneur it’s always a good idea to purchase your domain name. For example, if your name is John Smith, it’s worth buying johnsmith.com, johnsmithonline.com, johnsmith.org, johnsmith.co.uk etc. This ensures that others won’t be able to use your name for their own services and it also makes your name more Google-able. 

Design it yourself 

It may be tempting to want to hire a web designer, but for most freelancer website caes its great to take a DIY approach. You will learn great editing skills and save money. There are so many softwares available to do so from Wix to WordPress and SquareSpace. 

Use friendly, plain language 

Your ‘About’ page is one of the first your viewers will go to. Don’t over complicate it – tell it straight with an amicable tone. How would you describe what you do to a friend of a friend at a coffee shop within one minute? That’s the sort of tone we’re going for. 

Use an attractive photo 

As a freelancer, you are your business so your website visitors should know who you are. Use a professional yet friendly photo that showcases your personality on the Home page. Ask yourself; would I want to do business with this person? 

You don’t need to pay for SEO 

Particularly in the early stages of your website development, it isn’t necessary to pay for SEO to optimise your website reach. As long as you’re using keywords in your website title and description it should suffice. The site-builder tools usually have ways to do this built in. 

Use a mobile-first approach 

Choose a provider that offers a mobile first approach option. By centering the artistic direction around the mobile experience, designers are encouraged to reign in design decisions by virtue of the limitations. These include size constraints and features which work without need for a mouse. As a result, mobile approach tends to showcase simplicity that doesn’t overwhelm a small smart phone screen. You want to ensure that your site is attractive both on desktop and mobile for maximum effect. 

Minimise text, maximum image 

As a result, with a mobile-friendly approach, you want to optimise image and minimise text. Auto-fill opportunities, such as divining most of an address from a postal code or providing pre-filled selections for common email suffixes, can take the pain out of some of these interactions. 

Navigation 

On a mobile, navigation is crucial due to the small screen size. For this reason, you’ll want to minimise the size of the menu. Depending on how complex your menu is, each menu option may contain more nested options, or a submenu. When the user clicks into one of these submenus, it is best to have the new list of options replace the existing menu in order to keep the list short.