Once upon a time, you could only create something that was professionally designed if you knew how to do it yourself or had a designer. This is not the case anymore. Publishing finished, high-converting visuals in an afternoon, not a month, template-driven tools have quietly changed the landscape to give business owners, marketers, and individual content creators the power to create high-quality visuals. A properly constructed template handles the spacing, color logic, layout etc. and the user simply inserts his or her message into the template, which does the rest. That's significant because the majority of the marketing materials a small business truly needs to have (social graphics, one pager, landing pages, ad creative) don't need original thinking. They need to be consistent, clear and not distract from the message. Without a design degree, it is not so much about how talented you are anymore to be able to get there, but it is about who you know which principles you should rely on and which tools you do have, that already have those principles built in.
The 4 Principles of Clean and Professional Marketing Design
There are a few reasons why most amateur marketing materials end up being ineffective—and none of those reasons involve being talented. The largest one is clutter. Empty space is wasted space, in the eyes of the non-designer so they're cramming all the flyer, banner or landing page with text, logos and graphics – to the point where there's nothing left. White space does not mean empty space, it is the space that is used to give the eye a break and convey to the viewer what is important on the page. A headline with breathing room is important and reads as such. When this headline is combined with three other elements in the same space it becomes noise.
The second fix is typographical hierarchy: it's almost all about restraint. One piece of marketing material should have one clear entry point (typically a headline in a larger, bold font) and then subheads and body text that flow in a logical sequence leading the eye down the page. Most errors committed by non-designers involve the use of four or five fonts, sizes and font effects on a single page because they deem all of these elements important enough to emphasize. If it's all important, it's no longer important. Choosing two fonts, one for your headlines and the other for your body copy and using a consistent size scale is more important to giving your website a "professional" appearance than any clever design trick.
The third component is brand color consistency, which distinguishes a business that appears to be thriving from a business that’s still in the midst of finding its footing. That doesn't imply that it is a single shade for ten items of content. It involves selecting two to three base colors and picking an accent color, and then using them consistently all the time, calls to action, headers and neutral backgrounds. Trust is established by consistency, and when customers encounter the same color scheme on your website, social media posting and in your email, they know that your business is organized and purposeful, regardless of whether or not anyone in your company has any design expertise.
The final and most important is mobile friendly which is the one that is the most difficult to get right for non-designers as it's not until it's an issue that they can see it. What may be a nice neat desktop design can turn into a jumbled, overlapping mess of a phone design if it wasn't designed that way from the beginning. A responsive layout that is broken on mobile isn't a bug as the majority of marketing communications – emails, social links, blog posts – are opened on a mobile device first. It means the distinction in between a visitor staying or going within the first two seconds. That is where good templates come in handy: Whitespace, hierarchy, color logic and mobile behavior are all already addressed, tested and coded into the template, leaving the template user to only add their own words and images.
Using No-Skill Design on Your Web Design Structure
The same could go for a website, as anything that holds true for flyers and social graphics are even more true for a website — the consequences are bigger, and a website is where visitors determine whether or not to trust a business at all. Why it's better for non-designers to build on an existing framework than a blank canvas:
- Blank page is the most costly layout that a non-designer can make. When starting a website from scratch, there are hundreds of little choices one has to make about the layout, and if one doesn't have a design background, none of the choices are likely to be right, and before one knows it, the site looks amateurish, even if the site's content is great.
- There is no visual hierarchy interference with pre-engineered layouts. People who professionally design websites like blogger have already made up the headlinings, content flow and spacing that is required to ensure good SEO placement in the template, so the business owner never has to guess if a layout "looks right" or not.
- The magazine style of organization immediately suggests authority and organization. A non-designer might spend weeks trying to do by hand what Citron can do automatically, and the result is likely to be not as clean, not as well organized with featured sections and categories, and not as well designed with a clear visual flow as a content hub designed by Monster.
- Frequency publishers will look consistent with a content based layout. Mag Paper has been designed for creators who publish frequently, and make sure that every new post, guide, or review is designed the same cleanly each time without having to be re-designed by anyone each time content is added.
- Responsive behaviour is not added on afterwards, but integrated. Premium templates are mobile first, so the template you'll see on a laptop screen will look as good on a phone screen as well, provided you do no further arrangement or manual testing.
- AdSense friendly layouts, which means that the monetization does not destroy the design. The premium blogger templates that are compatible with Adsense have ad positions embedded in the template, so the blog will have ads without ruining the clean design that was worked for by those who don't have a design background.
- Pairing of font and color logic is already solved. One of the most frequent mistakes made by non-designers - using fonts and colors that don't match - are simply not a possibility with a professionally constructed template because the fonts and colors have been already tested to work well together.
- A unified system ensures brand integrity throughout each and every page. A template based site will maintain uniformity of all pages, both blogs and landing pages, in terms of appearance; something that makes a business appear more stable and less put-together than different designs for each page.
How to create an impactful Content Hub effortlessly.
The power of leveraging a well established platform isn't apparent on day one. If you're a marketer who's blogging regularly and creating helpful content such as product reviews, guides, and case studies, you want all of them to fit together, but not have to be completely redesigned each time. Hence the need of a stable and super lean theme. A clean framework, such as SEO Spot or another free blogger template from Piki Templates, is created so that structure and style are carried over automatically: publish a new post, and it will have clean spacing, typography and mobile friendly behavior as all of the previous posts.
That consistency compounds. If they visit one article and like it, then they are much more likely to visit the next article to see something they like and then the next and so on, because the site doesn't seem “cobbled together.” This isn't something that needs to be done by a designer for every new content push — it's something that's done by a framework that does the repetitive work automatically. Each review of the products seems to be next to each marketing guide. All new posts are mobile ready as soon as they're published – no additional testing process necessary.
This is also where a lot of marketers find that they can typically generate ad revenue on a regular basis as a side benefit. A stable hub with a well structured set up will help visitors to stay on a site and engage with reading the content, as opposed to bouncing off a cluttered or slowly loading site. The more time spent on site and the more pages visited per visit, the more the ad will perform – no extra work or design needed. The framework is working double time – not only does it keep the brand in good shape, but the business is also making passive income as long as the marketer doesn't have to touch the cleaning of the last blog post but can just be working on the next one.
Enabling Your Brand with Intelligent Frameworks
Marketing is not really an art anyway, it's always been about great marketing. It is a matter of clear communication – saying the right thing, in the right order and in a manner that does not detract from the message. Whitespace, hierarchy, consistency of color and mobile friendliness are all simply a means to ensure that a message is actually received, so do not need a design education nor a background in design to apply appropriately when design is working behind the scenes. Making use of a professionally engineered template is not a failure to cut corners, but rather a smart business owner's/marketer's approach to running a business: Use a proven system rather than reinventing the wheel. This is how a business can attain real authority and results without having to ever write a line of code, or learn a design principle the hard way.
