The design of a website is very important for your traffic, maybe as important as the content of your web page. Over time, the design of your blog or online market (as example) may seem old to the user, affecting your website's traffic.
To avoid this problem you got to keep your design modern and cool over time. A complete re-construction of a website it's expensive and takes time. The solution would be the redesigning of your page. I'll reveal to you some tricks to make this redesign cheap and effective.
The grafic design of your website is mainly created with images. You can improve that designing if you improve the quality of those images. This can be done quick with the right image manipulation tools.
OK, image manipulation tools, but what kind of tools?...
I recommend online tools, as they are free and the result is the same as using expensive software like Photoshop. There are some websites that provide this kind of tools for you and they are easy to use.
Now, let's see what elements of the page are the most important for your website's design.
1. The main menu ... You can easily change your menu by using some free menu generators. I know some generators that are able to deliver to you a unique and fully personalized menu in seconds. You need to create a new menu that is the same size as your old one and that's how you avoid to change your entire template.
2. Thumbnails - It's simple to make your thumbnails look fresh and unique by using a online thumbanail creator. You can make yout thumbnails look new and fancy by adding some shadow effects or a cool mirror effects to them. More than this, it's recommended to customize them by a transparent watermark with your logo.
3. Large Images - make them cool by adding shadow effects and why not, a small reflection effect.
4. Buttons - shadows and reflections works good with buttons as well.
5. Widgets. Add some widgets to your page: calendar, clock, maybe a voting system as well.
If you follow those 5 steps you'll get a new look for your website and that's gona make or traffic to increase. And it takes only a hour to aplly those changes. Success!!!
