Smart ideas for sprucing up your website

Without a little spring-cleaning, every website—whether it’s hip and fun or more traditional—gets a little dusty now and then. There are ways to keep things fresh that don’t take up too much of your time.

Here are seven tips for updating your site with simple changes that will make a big impact:

Add new images

New photos and illustrations are probably the simplest way to update your site and grab a visitor’s attention. Who doesn’t like to look at pictures? Especially if they show a new product, a recent event, or something cool like that. Yola’s Picture Widget makes adding images a snap. Like all of our widgets, it starts with a simple drag-and-drop. Then you can easily upload your own images, or even choose from our library of stock images.

Change your banner

What’s the first thing visitors see when they come to your site? The banner across the top of your homepage. While you want to keep it looking fairly consistent, so visitors know they’re in the right place, it never hurts to update images and/or text to keep things interesting. Changing your banner now and then with a fresh image, a fun video, or a new headline lets people know you’ve got something new and exciting going on—and helps ensure they keep coming back for new updates. Explore easy ways to update your banner today.

Refresh your style

If you’re ready for a bigger change to the look of your website, consider updating your style. This isn’t something you’ll want to do too often—especially if your site represents your business—as you want to maintain a familiar brand consistency that people will instantly recognize. People like new content, but they also like a bit of familiarity. That said, a new style is a great way to keep your site looking fresh. If you do decide to update your style, you may want to time your new style with the addition of a new section to your site, a big announcement, or some other major change. Just make sure that you give your visitors a heads-up and explain why you’ve made the change.

Customize your site with CSS

Don’t know what CSS is? It stands for Cascading Style Sheet, and it’s an awesome tool for making your website look exactly the way you want it. Available only with Yola Silver, CSS is a more advanced way of editing a site for people who want to be a little more hands-on. If CSS sounds like something that you’d like to try, you should check it out today—it can be a lot of fun!

Get a new website address (URL)

You may have chosen a free domain name (also known as your website address or URL) when you first built your site with Yola. While the free option is perfectly acceptable, you might want to consider using a custom domain name that features only your business name and more accurately reflects who you are. You can even change the suffix, such as .org or .net (or even .co.uk or other countries if you’re outside the U.S.).

Add cool new features with widgets

If you haven’t already learned about widgets, you’re missing out! Widgets are awesome tools that you simply drag-and-drop onto your page to add cool new content, such as maps, videos, online appointment booking, chat rooms, search boxes, and lots more. There’s no code to write, so in just minutes you can add features that really keep visitors to your site engaged—and coming back for more.

Tell a story with video

If you’d like to add video to your website, but have no idea how to do it, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is. Video is perfect for telling a story about a product, service, experience, or philosophy to compliment your site content, or when simple words or pictures won’t do. It’s just one more simple way to keep your site fresh and keep people interested in what you have to offer. See, updating your website is simpler than you thought, isn’t it? Explore your different options, find out which ones make the most sense for your site, and spruce it up in just minutes. You might be surprised at the difference a small change can make.

See, updating your website is simpler than you thought, isn’t it? Explore your different options, find out which ones make the most sense for your site, and spruce it up in just minutes. You might be surprised at the difference a small change can make.