How to Best Design a Health Driven Website to Inspire Others

Planning on building a health driven website? Whether you’re planning on building a general health, diet or fitness site, you want to design a site that’s inspiring and engaging to your visitors. You want to evoke positive emotions but also ensure that you design helps you establish your online presence. Rather than copying what other sites in this space are doing, it’s better to understand what makes these sites work. Here are some great tips for building a great looking health site.

1. Use an Engaging Leading Image

Health sites are naturally visually oriented. Visitors expect imagery that relates to what they are looking for. What you want to do is to make a big statement by using large, bold and engaging imagery for your website. Whether you use a hero image or a header, make sure that your image captures the attention of your visitors and entices them to learn more about what you have to offer on your site. A great leading image really sets the precedent to everything else.

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2. Simplify Navigation Path

Health sites naturally have a lot of content. As a result, many sites tend to be all over the place with where they lead their visitors and the number of options that are presented to the visitors. What you want to do is scrap trying to offer your visitors a buffet. Instead, simplify your navigation path so that your visitors only have a few clear choices to make. You want to make sure that the majority of your visitors are being lead to what they’re looking for.

3. Use the Right Colors and Themes

The color and theme you use are a big part of your site’s identity. You have to really think about what the purpose of your site is and build a theme around that. Small accents like logos, icons and bordering really go a long way to how your site looks. You can often find pre-built theme oriented templates for platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Just make sure that your web hosting provider supports these platforms and follow the basic instructions for installing the templates.

The colors you use can depend on many things from your brand, goals to the overall topic of your site. For example, Fitbit is a popular electronic fitness tracking device and has taken a simple approach with a lot of white space to highlight their technology. Elm City Market is a farming coop site that uses brown, yellow and green colors to play into the farming concept. Overall, the right combination of colors and palettes really is what it’s all about.

4. Typography Matters

Your site’s typography will make a huge impact on how your site appears to your visitors. The first thing to understand is that typography will affect the readability of your site. If you want your content to be consumed, you need to use the right typography. Second, you want to use typography that stands out from other sites. Many sites go with the default font and size. As a result, many of these sites tend to look and feel similar. Experiment with unique fonts and font sizing to figure out how to make your presentation unique.pexels-photo-2190035. Use High Quality Photography

One common characteristic that all well-designed health sites have is high quality photography. You can clearly see that they’ve invested the time or money into taking great photos. Many website owners seem to want to take shortcuts by going with stock photos offered by their web hosting provider or stock photo site. Stock photos can work if you can find a really good one. However, a large number of them have clear tells that indicate they are stock photos. If you do use stock photos, be judicious about which one you use as they can hurt the brand image you are trying to create with your site.

6. Use Strong Call to Actions

Another common characteristic of great health sites is that they all use strong calls to action. They make sure that they use active language and graphic based font to get their visitors to make the click. They also use buttons that stand out from their color scheme and design to indicate that these buttons are clickable. If these sites are using regular text that links to other pages, they make it very clear with mouseover actions that affect the border, text or the background.

7. Try a Story Oriented Design

The sites that really stand out the most and really do an incredible job in branding often use a story oriented design. They create a narrative that connects together across multiple pages. The pages are accompanied by visuals that help tell and support the story. By the end of the browsing session, visitors walk away feeling like they connected with the company or brand and were given a unique experience. This approach may not be applicable to all health sites but if you have a unique story to tell, this approach can work well.

As you can see, creating an inspiring health website goes beyond the visual design. A great looking site not only offers a relevant and engaging presentation to the visitor, it also does a great job in getting the visitor to consume the content and navigate through the website.

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