I know Write of Passage is for publishing your writing, not perfecting your website.

But I thought it would be helpful to share some practical and 0-cost design tips to give our online homes a beauty boost because when you host a party, you don’t want your home to be messy.

You want your online home to be as comfy as possible for your guests, right?

If you follow these tips, it would make your human guests feel more engaged to read your writing, and robo-crawlers from Google will also be happy campers for SEO purposes.

So without further ado, let’s dig into it!

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1. Crop and Compress

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I know Squarespace and other services have a built-in image formatting feature. But “sometimes” (I mean, often), the images are still too large and they could slow down your site quite a bit (or is it my ISP? or maybe it’s Maybelline?)  

When your site is slow, your visitors get frustrated and “bounce back” without reading your stuff. Squarespace says “use an image file of less than 500KB for best results” but the average size of photos these days ranges from “3MB” to “7-10MB” Way too big! So what you gotta do is to crop and compress.

My favorite online tools are these:

For cropping

Photo editor online - Pixlr.com

For compression

TinyPNG

Both of them work in your browser, so you don’t have to download anything. Just drag and drop your image files, let them do the work for you.  

2. Careful with Centering

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Even if you are using a template, you can often play around with how you align your texts. That’s when things get messy. I hate to tell you like this because it sounds so blunt but here it is:

Don’t center align your paragraph.

It makes it harder for readers to read your text. Readers have no stable anchor edge to bring back their eyes when they are zigging and zagging. Stay with left-aligned paragraphs. Just like you, they are reading hundreds of emails. You don’t want to add unnecessary burdens to their eyes.

Perhaps only times I’d consider using center-aligned text are:

1. A big header for a title and
2. when I want to convey the “classic” atmosphere found on the front page of medieval literature.

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But for our practical publishing purposes, sticking with left-aligned text is the way to go.

If you are still curious about how to deliver best user experience on your website, you might find these links interesting:

• Why You Should Never Center Align Paragraph Text
• 10 Bad Typography Habits that Scream Amateur

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3. Check with Mobile

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If you are you using Squarespace or any other similar services, don’t worry about how your site’s going to look on mobile.

For now.

But when you start tweaking a template for more custom-looking design, watch out.

You WILL break some things.

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By that, I mean you could have images cut off to the side and paragraphs on top of each other making your site looking like a disaster zone when viewed with a smaller screen device.

The only way to avoid this is to meticulously check your design in each screen size from large to small and fix it step by step. It could be very time-consuming but there is no way around it.

Or, you can simply opt-out from this hassle by sticking with a template. It’s your call.

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Back to Writing!

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Alright, there you have it. 3 basic web design tips for online writers.

David’s analogy of having a “Start Here” page as being a great host at the party is spot on. And when you have guests over to your home, it’s our job to make sure that our home is tidy and our guests are happy.

I guess a good web design practice basically boils down to that concept: Happy home, happy guest.

Thanks for reading and hit me up if you have any questions.

Happy writing,

Jim