http://hugsformonsters.com/

The Hug For Monsters website not only has a great name but also has a great illustrated style to it.

Each page on this website has a different illustration on it, with each as imaginative and creative as the next. Behind the illustrations he has included a grainy background to add more detail and texture. This is a really subtle technique to make your website look instantly more professional than using block colour.



When you go the ‘Work’ page he has chosen a gallery to display his portfolio work which I believe is the best way to display multiply images, so that the viewer doesn’t become overwhelmed. Furthermore if you go to the ‘About’ page the designer has another creative illustration with an interesting page layout and use of great typography. I think with a lot of small business websites typography is often forgotten about, however it can dramatically make or break your site and it is worth visiting websites like www.myfonts.com and www.dafont.com for some interesting styles.

Creating a simple, fresh and clean website design is definately not an easy task even for the most experienced.  Some people seem to think that the more colours you use in your design or pages, the greater the impact on the visitor to the site - however this has been proven incorrect on many occasions. Luckily though, there are some fantastic online tools out there to help you wrangle those wild colours down to a clean and minimal approach. One of these tools that I tend to use when I'm in need of some colour inspiration, is colourlovers.com. 

Colourlovers, as the name suggests, is an online community of designers that create and share colour palletes with anyone that is inspired by them.  For beginners, they make it easy to browse for colour inspiration using ready-made palattes and patterns, or by searching for colours using HEX or RGB codes.

Once you've found a lovely pallette that compliments your business / website, you can start transforming your its branding with the click of a few buttons.  Those of you using one of Mr Site's Takeaway Website packages can easily set a global colour scheme for your entire website by using the 'Global fonts' tool, found in 'Extras' and then 'Personalise'.  Of course, if you've applied any colour styles to text directly in 'Change content', then those direct (or in-line) styles will override your global settings, so you might need to do a little cleaning here and there.

So for those of you trapped in-doors this Winter (if you're in the UK, of course!) perhaps a spot of palette creation and website re-jigging is the perfect way to see in the new year & reel in some more potential website visitors.  A word of caution though, colour finding is highly addictive, so find your palette and stick to it, and most of all - have fun.

www.bottlerocketcreative.com

Bottle Rocket is another simple one page website, which is very in trend at the moment for website designers.  The design is sticking to a simple rule of ‘clean and simple’ with perfect bold typography contrasting with the narrow text of the content. This helps to maintain that professional feel to the website.

In the ‘Recent Work’ section they have used a handy little script called Light box which is a great way to display your images. We also have a similar image displayer within our gallery settings here at Mr Site, so you could achieve a very similar look yourself.

www.kaleidoscopeapp.com

Welcome to the first post of Inspirational website of the week. Each week I'm going to be picking a website I feel has real creative flare and elements that could help improve your Mr Site website.

When I first look at this website I am instantly drawn into the typography complied of elegant handwritten script and bold, large text. The consistency of the text throughout each detailed section creates a professional but artistic feel.

Also by having a single paged website divided up into different sections the usability of the website is very easy with creative but simple layouts used. The designer also added in lots of icons to add more detail to the content, which is a simple but effective way to make your website look more professional.