Some people think that to make an excellent design; you need to fill your space with as many elements as you can. The pros disagree. Designers understand that what makes a great design isn’t so much what you see, but also what you do not see. It’s not just how much of the space is filled, but also how much of it isn’t. This why white space is a crucial element is graphic and web design.

What is white space?

The term pertains to the space between the elements of the design. It is the part of the page that contains no lines, images, or text. It is the space between graphics, boxes, columns, words, and margins. It is what casual observers may call the empty space.

Undeniably, white space makes for clean-looking content. The human mind has a natural affinity for order and this is one of the reasons tidy visuals tend to be more attractive than cluttered ones. A clean page is easier on the eyes and the mind and as such, is preferred by most viewers. In fact, white space is one of the best ways to enhance the visual appeal of your output.

There are two kinds of white space:

• Active white space. This refers to the space that you deliberately add to your design to create a particular effect, whether it is to lead your viewer’s eye or to emphasize a point, among others.
• Passive white space. This pertains to space that occurs naturally, such as the spaces between the lines of a paragraph.

Contrary to what its name suggests, white space isn’t always white. It is simply the portion of the page that designers don’t want you to focus on. As such, it may come in different colors and may even feature repetitive patterns or shapes.

Why do you use white space?

Some consider white space the fundamental building block of good design, and for good reason, too. When used properly, white space can do wonders for your output. Here are some of its merits:

• It makes content easy to understand. Too many elements in your design can be difficult for viewers to take. White space minimizes visual stimuli to the bare minimum, helping the brain cope more effectively and take in information more readily. This is especially true when your content offers text for users to read. A study suggests that the effective use of white space can have a positive impact on the comprehensibility of the text in your content.
• It helps guide your viewer’s focus. Removing unnecessary elements and using a healthy amount of white space helps your reader focus on the message you want to convey. Instead of having to interpret extra images or text, your readers only have to focus on which part of the content truly matters.
• It helps creates emphasis. Do you want users to perform a certain action after seeing your design? Then place a call to action (CTA) and make sure it is the most visible part of your content. The easiest way to do this is to use sufficient white space around the CTA to make it stand out. You practically leave them with no choice but notice your CTA and just maybe do what you want them to do. Needless to say, you can also use this strategy for other elements in your design, such as specific symbols, words, or pictures.
• It helps create balance. This is an important factor to consider in any design. Even if you use loud and busy graphics, you can still create a lovely design by employing enough white space as a counterbalance of sorts. This is a strategy commonly used in magazines and newspapers where pictures and text are commonly found together.
• It acts as an effective separator. Do you need to establish borders between the various elements of your design? Look no further and just use the trusted white space. This is a great way to create neat partitions without using new elements that will overload your output. In fact, you’ll even end up placing better emphasis on the different parts of your page.
• It imbues sophistication and elegance. Apple is currently one of the first brands that come to mind when you mention sophistication. Steve Jobs-era Apple products effectively combined simplicity, sleekness, and elegance not just in their design, but also in their functionality. These qualities are visible and are reinforced even, by the amount of white space used on the Apple website. All you see are products against a stark white or black background, as well as a line or two of well-written text. This emphasis on minimalism is an aesthetic that’s also followed by many luxury brands.
• It allows viewers to use their imagination. White space isn’t emptiness all throughout. It can also mean potential. Using it right is like creating a cliffhanger at the end of the story. You practically tell viewers to let their imagination run wild and decide what else the design is trying to say besides what is obviously present. It evokes a sense of mystery. This is great for designs that connote growth, transformation, or the passage of time.

Many marketers are concerned with ensuring that viewers receive the message they want to convey fully. As such, they often end up choosing a design that is filled with as many elements as they can fit into the page. While delivering the right information is vital—and is, in fact, the main motivation behind almost any designing endeavor—the right amount of care must be taken in ensuring that said message is provided effectively in a manner that viewers and readers would appreciate and easily digest.

White space tempers what could be convoluted design and provides observers’ eyes with enough opportunity to pause and really take in what they are looking at. White space is attractive, versatile, and is potent at capturing and managing the attention and expectations of viewers. As such, using it right is essential to creating an excellent design.

Balance Your Web Design

Whitespace balances out a website with overwhelming content. If your site lacks harmony and balance, you may want to consider a website redesign. Call us at 480-970-4688 or fill out our online form to receive a free quote.

Here are nine essential tips to keep in mind.

1. Use the right image.

Don’t use a picture just for the sake of having an image there. Images should reflect what you’re talking about in your article or what you’re selling if you have an e-commerce website.

If you have the means to do photo shoots and capture images, then you would have no problem generating pictures that you need. However, there are those with limited resources and would have to rely on another image source to find pictures for their website.

The good news is there’s a wide pool of photo sources available online today, but the challenge comes with sifting through these virtual galleries in order to find the images that match your needs. For a start, you can go to popular websites the features free images like Flickr.com, Pixabay, Unsplash, and Public Domain Archive.

Example Image c/o Pixabay

Be mindful of the license provided and rules for using those pictures. Do you need to cite the owner? Can it be used for commercial purposes? Be sure to comply with these guidelines to avoid conflict and lawsuits.

2. Write appropriate file names.

Search engines also pay attention to the file name of your images to understand what they’re all about. So don’t skimp on time when writing file names and make sure that they are descriptive enough. For instance, if you’re featuring an image of a luxury bag in your post, it’s best to set the file name according to its brand and model.

3. Determine the right file format to use.

File format is another essential factor that you need to work on for images you want to use on the web. Today, there are three formats usually used for images online, and these are:

• JPEG (.jpg) – JPEG is a file type used when you want to reduce the image size without compromising on the quality too much. While a JPEG file may not be as sharp as the original image, the loss in detail is not so obvious. It can be considered as the default image format for most images on the Internet today.
• GIF (.gif) – GIF is used for more simple images such as icons and animations. It only supports 236 colors, which means that it’s not an ideal format for pictures that need to show intricate details like a product shot or a landscape image.
• PNG (.png) – PNG is a fairly new file type compered to JPEG and GIF. However, it’s better than GIF and doesn’t decrease in quality like JPEG does. However, it’s bigger in size and not widely supported.

4. Compress your images.

Page speed is a ranking factor for Google, and the size of your images can affect how long a webpage will load. The larger the size, the slower the load time.

If you’re using Adobe Photoshop, you can use the “save for web” option to reduce the size of your image before uploading it to your website. Otherwise, you can use other free and simpler to tools such as PicMonkey, Pixlr, or FotoFlexer.

Meanwhile, if you want smaller dimensions for your images, don’t just simply edit the source code. Because regardless if it’s proportionally reduced, the file size remains large and it can take a toll on your page speed.

5. Don’t neglect putting an alt text.

Alt text is short for alternative text. It appears when you hover your cursor over an image or if there’s a problem with loading the photo. Optimizing your alt text is a way to describe what’s in the picture to search engines as well as visually impaired users who use screen readers when they surf the web.

If you want to boost your SEO score, you can incorporate appropriate keywords in your alt text. Don’t use keywords like “luxury bags for sale best deal”. Keep it in context and make it understandable by search engine crawlers and users alike. Also, you can check with your website analytics to determine how users key in their queries that lead to your website and pattern your alt text from there.

6. Manage your thumbnails accordingly.

For e-commerce websites, thumbnails provide shoppers an easy way to browse through your products and catalogs. However if images used as thumbnails are not compressed enough, they can slow down loading times which can turn potential clients off. So keep them as small as possible. Don’t worry too much about quality as they are not designed to be big and detailed anyway.

Also, make sure that the alt tag for the thumbnail is different from its bigger and clearer version so that search engines will not have a hard time determining which to index.

7. Avoid third-party image hosting services.

Steer clear away from third-party image hosting websites. While they can appear beneficial in terms of saving space and bandwidth, there’s always the risk of your images being deleted or blocked especially when they are loaded with traffic. This results to images not showing up in your website. That’s something you wouldn’t want to take a risk on, especially in terms of user experience.

8. Use an image sitemap.

An image sitemap provides more information about the images used on your website even those that are loaded by a JavaScript code. If you have an existing sitemap, you can simply add image details on it. Otherwise, you can create a separate one for your images. Regardless of which you opt to do, you need to use the proper tags as recommended by Google.

9. Refer to Google Posting Guidelines.

Google has set out image posting guidelines that can help you optimize your pictures better for user experience and SEO score. If in case you want to clarify anything or want to make sure that you’re adhering to the best practices, you can refer to it here.

Web content and optimization is not just about textual information like articles and blog posts. It involves a myriad of elements such as images. If you want to dominate the SERPs, don’t overlook image optimization and make sure that you allot time for it and follow the nine tips discussed.

Content marketing is all about providing quality information that’s helpful to your target audience and delivering that message in the most effective way. However, written word alone can only go so much, and in today’s digital landscape, it may not be enough to compel users to read until the end and see what you have to say. That being said, how can you improve your content to pique enough user interest, so that you can drive your point across and create an impact?

Quick answer: Present your content with the help of visuals.

Why Visuals Matter

Incorporating visuals in your content marketing strategy is worth considering because 90% of information that the brain receives is visual. More so, it is found that 43% of presentations are more effective when they are accompanied with visual materials.

Clearly, adding more visual elements to your content can help improve your exposure and user engagement. To help you get started, here are seven types of visuals that can be essential to your content marketing efforts.

1. Photos

Articles with images get 94% more views than articles that relied on text alone.

Photos can reinforce your written content and helps break chunks of texts, which makes information more readable. When using photos, remember that it should be related to what you’re talking about. More so, they should be composed and shot well, so that they would be more interesting and pleasing look at.

It’s advisable to capture photos on your own, so that it can incorporate character or traits that are inherent to your brand. If not, you can choose beautiful images from free online sources such as Pixabay, Morguefile, and Flickr.

2. Infographics

Infographics are a good way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.

There are crucial factors that affect how effective your infographics would be, such as colors, layout, font, and sources. Visual elements should be cohesive and embody what the point is all about. You don’t simply create an icon or element “just for the sake of design”. Every element in your infographic should have a rationale and relation with the data presented.

3. Videos

Each day, there are 4 billion video views on YouTube. That’s a lot of potential audience that you can tap.

Just like infographics, videos provide a smart and entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring.

Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.

4. Quote Cards

Content marketing is not restrictive to your niche alone. In order to reach more people, you need to sometimes appeal to their emotions, and quote cards can do the trick.

Quote cards, as the name suggests, are illustrations or images that contains a quote. They can be easily shared in social media, because typically, these sayings invoke a universal truth—making it easy to relate to.

In creating quote cards, use your company’s color scheme and font, so that it will be cohesive with your branding. In addition, you can also choose sayings that somehow reflect your values as a brand or service provider.

5. Screenshots

Screenshots provide a good way to validate content. For instance, if your information claims that a particular marketing strategy works well on Facebook, providing a screenshot showing the technique being implemented along with the level of engagement it generated (number of likes or comments) will drive your point across. Just the same, if you’re offering a tool, may it be an app or software, a screenshot can be the best visualization tool to illustrate a particular feature and why it’s valuable.

6. Data Visualizations

Data like statistics and research findings adds more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. If you have such information within your article, you can turn them to visualizations like charts and graphs so that people can easily understand why those figures are important.

7. Tips and How-To’s

Internet users can’t resist helpful content. So, if you have step by step guides, hacks, or tips, you can break down that information into images to make it more appealing to your audience. Again, the trick is to provide clear images, so that users can easily follow your tips or instructions for a recipe, hairstyle, or a DIY activity.

Content marketing is not boxed within the realm of the written word. Play up the ways you deliver content and try spicing it up with stunning visuals to boost engagement and reach more people.

RELATED ARTICLE: 17 Secrets to Keep Your Content Fresh and Engaging

However, you may have the best content out there, but it will all be for nothing if it doesn’t reach your target audience. To make sure that your posts get the right exposure and touches the right people, you need to have a strong content marketing strategy. But today, achieving that is easier said than done.

At present, standing out in the web marketing arena is harder than ever. With Google’s ever-changing search engine algorithm, the fluctuating behaviors of Internet users, and emerging trends, it’s a tough battlefield to be in. That’s why Internet marketers need to be constantly on their toes in order to stay ahead of the game.

A comforting thought is that you can always stand out from the rest. If you want to step up your content marketing for 2016 and for years to come, here are eight tips to help you break through the clutter, reach your target audience, generate leads, and increase conversions.

1. Understand your target market.

Whether you’re targeting millennials or an older demographic, you need to understand their behavior and find out what compels them to check out content and what irks them to scroll past certain links.

Being familiar with your target market gives you a sense of direction of how you’re going to create content and how you’re going to deliver it to the people you’re trying to reach. It keeps you organized and focused, allowing you to pour your efforts on techniques that have higher chances of working to your advantage and paying off.

2. Have a Content Generation Plan

Meet with your team regularly and discuss ideas. Create some sort of idea database where you can put in concepts that you can build content from.

Tip: Use helpful tools during content planning such as Google Keyword Planner Google. This tool lets you know keywords and phrases that are highly searched in your niche, and you can build content around those terms.

It also pays to create a style guide. A style guide is not just about proper grammar it’s about establishing a unique voice in all your content. For instance, you can create a list of promotional jargons and words you should avoid in order to relate to your audience better and not sound too promotional or manipulative.

3. Always Prioritize Value.

People will always find value in content that provides solutions and essential information they can benefit from. Your content should do exactly that if you want it to go viral and deliver success to your business.

If you want to break through Web today, you need to provide people with what they need even if it means going way below or past the typical 500-word margin.

Sure, the phrase TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) was coined in the recent past to call out lengthy articles that are dragging to read and make people click on the close window button. However, content only becomes hard to digest when it’s only beating around the bush and doesn’t present any essential information.

Focus more on the meat of your content and worry less about length. People will stick with your post until the last word if you give them interesting insight that they haven’t seen anywhere else.

Meanwhile, short posts don’t necessarily equate to little value. There are content that don’t require lengthy explanation and only warrant short blurbs of text. For instance, if you post a video, you don’t necessarily need a 1000-word description for it because its value is packed within the clip.

TIP: Creating valuable content requires time. So don’t rush your research and idea development. What you can do is lessen the frequency of your posting so that you can devote more time with creating quality content. For instance, if you post a 500-word blog post three times a week, why not go for a 1,500-word in-depth article once a week?

4. Create Stunning Visuals.

Get your target audience’s attention with visuals like images, infographics, and videos. It is a good way to get your message across, relate to your audience, compel them to share your content, and encourage them to check the rest of the things that you have to offer.

Written articles are important, but adding variety to your content through pictures can boost engagement and ultimately lead to higher conversion. Images can also promote better readability for long articles.

5. Allow Participation from the Audience.

You don’t have to do the talking all the time. Let your audience participate in your content marketing campaign through polls, quizzes, Q&As, and Twitter chats. This allows you to build a relationship with your audience and make them feel valued. As a result, not only will you gain their trust, but you will also learn what they want and boost brand awareness.

6. Optimize your Website for all Platforms.

People should be able to enjoy your content regardless of whether they’re viewing it on their desktop computers or their mobile devices. When your website caters to all platforms, you have higher chances of delivering your content to a wider audience.

7. Stay Unique.

Possibly, the most foolproof way to stand out and break through the market is to stay unique and have an identity of your own. While there’s a wide pool of content in the Web today and you may have similarities with other brands, you will still be able to stand out if you build original content from your own ideas. Yes, you may need information from existing sources, but you need to develop those into unique and insightful content.

TIP: You can speak from experience. For instance, if you are a financial planner, you can share helpful tips and advice on money management that you learned while on the job.

8. Embrace Changes.

Whether your like it or not, trends will always come, Google’s algorithm will continue to evolve, and Web user’s behaviors will change. You should be willing to adapt with market shifts and adjust your strategy from time to time, so that you can stay on top of the competition.

As you try to penetrate your target market, keep these eight tips in mind as you carry out your strategy. Content marketing takes a lot of hard work, but you can be successful at it if you have a strong brand and know what to focus on.

READ: 17 Secrets to Keep Your Content Fresh and Engaging

Share this Image On Your Site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to https://www.primeview.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /> <p><a href=’https://www.primeview.com/blog/how-to-step-up-your-content-marketing-strategy-8-essential-tips/’><img src=’https://www.primeview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/How-to-Step-Up-your-Content-Marketing-Strategy-8-Essential-Tips-Infographics.jpg’ alt=’How to Step Up your Content Marketing Strategy: 8 Essential Tips’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /> <p>

Your Role as Web Designer

As a web designer, your role is to make the website as appealing to consumers as possible using a combination of texts, graphics, videos, and more. He or she has to have excellent design aesthetics but also has to have the creativity needed to be able to incorporate the client’s business objectives into the overall design scheme. You need to be inspired in order to create well-crafted designs that your clients will love.

More importantly, a good web designer has to have the right technical knowledge and experience to give websites that competitive edge over other competitors’ websites. Relevant content and accurate use of keywords coupled with a good web design is one of the best and fastest for a business ways to make it to the top of search engine results and reach out to consumers.

Web Design Tools

With this in mind, every web designer should have a collection of the best software tools that will help him or her get the job done. Here’s a list of the most reliable software programs, both free and paid, that will certainly help you create and design high quality websites with less hassle.

The list is categorized so you can choose from any of the programs in that category that you feel is the most compatible with your work style and preferences.

Color

• Adobe Kuler – Named after the Mauritian Creole word for color, Adobe Kuler is considered as one of the coolest apps for web design. It is a free software that allows members to design color schemes of their own, where each set consists of five colors. You can also upload existing color schemes and edit them using this tool.

• Kuler can be accessed using browser-hosted variants that run on Adobe Flash, as well as desktops using Adobe AIR. Another great thing about this tool is that when you download Switchboard from Adobe Labs, the desktop version of Kuler can export your created color scheme directly into Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

• Pictaculous – If you want an image but want a different color scheme for it, Pictaculous is a great tool. It’s also free, which makes it so cool. Just upload an image and it will generate custom color palettes based on your original image colors.

• Colorzilla – Also free and available as an extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Colorzilla helps web designers and developers with color-related tasks from basic to the most comples. Notable features include an Eye Dropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator, and Palette Viewer.

• Dribble – Popular with web designers, dribble.com offers inspiring designs and is considered a social network for web designers, a place where they can showcase their skills.

• Hues – For Mac OS users, Hues is a reliable color scheming tool. Although it’s a paid app ($2.99), this software is a simple, lightweight app that allows users to grab a color on any pixel that is displayed on your screen.

Typography

• • Google Webfonts – Google has an extensive collection of fonts that any designer on a budget can use as it is available for free.
    • Font Squirrel – A great source of free, high quality fonts are designer-friendly and easy to download.
    • Lost Type – Help other fellow designers by using fonts from Lost Type, where it features and sells fonts created by designers from all over the world. Choose and pay only for whatever you want, which means you can type in $0 and get a free download. Just don’t abuse the privilege, though. Designers of the fonts get 100% profit from their sales.
    • Typecast – The reason why you have to invest a few dollars is because it is is a very valuable tool to have. You can quickly check and edit the style, readability, and rendering while you work, making your work much more efficient.

Content Management

• WordPress – The most widely used and popular among content management systems, WordPress is a publishing software that is known for its easy-to-use interface, speed of access, and excellent user experience. It currently powers millions of websites.

• Joomla – It is one of the best content management systems and has millions of users from all over the world. An award-winning open source CMS, Joomlais great for building powerful websites. Its layout is also simple to use and is mobile device-compatible.

• Radiant CMS – If you want a no-nonsense CMS that is designed to work efficiently, this software is best for you. Content management is simplified to a tee and is designed for small teams. It’s also a free software, so you don’t have to take a single cent out of your pocket.

• Drupal – What does Harvard, MIT, and The Economist have in common? Their websites are all powered by Drupal, a free software package that offers a plethora of customization options.

• Expression Engine – If your client is willing to shell out a couple hundreds for a more advanced CMS, then get Expression Engine for around $299 and you get access to all levels of platform customization. This is why larger corporations such as Apple, Ford, and Nike choose Expression Engine to power their websites so they can easily incorporate their own preferences.

Other Useful Apps and Tools

• • GuideGuide – A cool photoshop extension that allows users to create grids as guides for image, text, or video placement. You can create more accurate rows, columns, baselines, and midpoints without having to pay for anything.
• • FileZilla – This is a free FTP solution. It’s an open source software that allows you to manage files on your web hosting account.
• • Aptana Studio – This a free app that is also the industry’s leading web application IDE. Available in both MAC and PC, this software allows you to code potentially any kind of application you can think of.