QUICK TIPS

1. Remove needless things

Minimalism (in website design) is all about figuring out the unnecessary elements in your site and removing them.

A few ideas to get you started:

• Does your website have a ton of social media buttons and widgets? Try replacing them with discreet social media sharing buttons.

• Do you have a ton of widgets in your blog sidebar? Sidebars should offer utilities to help browse your site, without being an attention magnet.

• Eliminate any other distractions.

The idea is to simply experiment with things: try removing some elements and then check your stats (Google Analytics, sales, messages from clients, etc.) to measure the effects.

Eventually, every element on a page should have a clear (measurable) purpose, otherwise, it’s just “noise”, throw it out.

It’s obviously easy to go overboard with this: with little experience, you could break a design (from an esthetic or functional point of view), it’s all a subjective process. So whenever possible, try contacting professionals to handle changes in your website design.

Despite the first advice above, when talking about minimalist photography websites, I don’t like to use the “less is more” expressions because…

• It just focuses only on “reduction”. The aim is not just to remove design elements. Minimalist websites are sometimes deceptively simple, but a huge amount of time has been put into the thought process.

• Less is not always more; less is sometimes less. It depends on whether you’re doing it for the right reasons.

• The expression also implies that “more” is always better, but it’s not.