Last Updated on July 6, 2022 by Sunny Staff
As of 2022, WordPress powers over 43% of all websites. It’s by far the most popular Content Management System (CMS) platform in the world. And it’s the preferred option of everyone from freelancers to Time magazine.
With an easy-to-use framework and tailored, high-quality site layouts that deliver a good UI, you can use WordPress to create a great-looking website that grabs viewers’ attention and keeps your bounce rate low.
Creating a site that attracts viewers is not easy in the visually competitive landscape of the internet. Knowing how to manage the aesthetics involved in website design is not a common skill. But it is one anyone can learn.
If you think your website could do with a bit of visual sprucing up, staying in the loop about current trends and ideas is one way to help you achieve that. With these aesthetic website ideas for WordPress, you can proudly showcase your work.
The Importance Of Aesthetics
Aesthetics are a set of design principles that influence color, contrast, shape, and layout.
How your website navigation works, how it flows and delivers a seamless UX, and the colors that make it stand out—these elements play a critical role in how viewers perceive your brand’s credibility.
Without a basic understanding of aesthetics, anyone who comes across the page won’t feel compelled to stay, causing rankings to drop and viewer satisfaction to plunge.
With the right aesthetics, your viewers will trust you more, engage with you more, and become more likely to invest in your site’s business (revenue-building) elements.
With the following six ideas, you can build a site that people want to return to again and again.
1) Try Creative Scrolling
Many new trends emerging in the web design field incorporate the use of original, creative scrolling. Instead of just going up and down, people now have the option to create sideways scrolling and creative transition methods such as the parallax effect for further engagement with viewers.
You can transform how people scroll through your site using creative imagery or dynamic horizontal features. Why not explore new ways of experiencing a digital page?
2) Use Hand-Drawn Illustrations
Hand-drawn illustrations have been a huge trend in web design throughout the 2020s. The increased availability of digital craftsmanship within the web design sphere has opened up exciting new illustration opportunities. And viewers respond well to them from a ranking perspective.
There’s something that feels authentic and engaging about a hand-drawn illustration. Working some into your blog posts or website background can deliver a more organic, likable feel.
3) Incorporate Visual Storytelling
Visual storytelling uses pictures, icons, colors, or other visual aids to take viewers on a visual journey. Something that makes users want to keep scrolling, stay tuned, and stick it out to the full length of the page.
Aesthetics play a huge role in visual storytelling. The way that you present your visual content will hugely influence how people perceive it, making narrative-driven visuals an important aspect of design.
You can also use charts and infographics to tell a visual story. And by illustrating segments of a topic, you can get your audience to follow along with complex narratives.
4) Neo-Brutalism
Brutalism is an architectural movement that originated in the 1940s, characterized by the exposure of harsh, raw materials like concrete. Nowadays, designers like to incorporate brutalism into web design, using stark visuals to achieve the same idea of harshness and experimentation. This is neo-brutalism.
Asymmetrical layouts, untreated images, plain backgrounds, and even default computer fonts all contribute to an idea of brutalism. This aesthetic has seen huge popularity in the 2020s, appreciated for its refreshingly bold and unapologetic stance on design.
5) Dark Mode
It’s not for everyone, but those that like it tend to really like it. A dark mode setting could add functional drama to the overall look and introduce a sleeker, more serious aesthetic appeal.
Dark mode works well for sites that focus on technology or legal affairs. It’s also ideal for a portfolio-style site as it showcases photography and art particularly well. But realistically, you can apply it to any site that seeks to adopt a bolder or more severe visual exterior.
6) Experiment With Bigger, Bolder Text
Many web designs urge their clients to be unafraid of bolder, larger-scale text. Not for blog content so much, but for headings and feature pieces that require something to draw viewers’ attention away from distractions and straight into the heart of your content.
Bigger fonts demand viewers’ attention and assert themselves visually on any webpage. Used sparingly and in the right places, large text can provide a necessary balance to sites with lots of small text blocks or images that contain a lot of detail.
With the wide variety of trendy fonts that we have today, downloading and using them in your WordPress blog is a simple yet highly effective way to elevate the aesthetic appeal of your site.
Make Your WordPress Site Stand Out
Aesthetics are an imperative component of any blog’s layout and design. Knowing how to layer, color, structure, and assemble the visual elements of a webpage is the key to unlocking a deeper connection with your audience and promoting increased traffic on your blog.
These days, you don’t have to be a professional web designer to create stunning visuals on your website. With the help of accessible CMS platforms and some time spent researching website aesthetics (well done, box ticked), anyone can build a visually pleasing and successful site.
WordPress is one of the best CMS platforms to experiment with new aesthetics. There, you can find a wide variety of different editing options to liven up your blog posts and keep viewers coming back for more.
If you need help with your WordPress site, give the experts at Sunny HQ a call. We love to help!
