Having a great online profile is an absolute must nowadays. Not only is it your best chance to make a lovely first impression, it is also an unparalleled avenue to pass across valuable information and give visitors a taste of what you have to offer.
Thankfully, every platform owes it to you to provide a base profile page with enough functionalities for you to work with. Even though they all vary in terms of possible customizations, most platforms allow just enough customizations for you to claim your profile and make it align with your brand.
In case you’ve been wondering what exactly makes a profile great, and what rules to follow to achieve this goal for yourself, you have come to the right place. Below is an in-depth guide regarding everything you need to know about profile design rules and more.
Crafting a Great Profile
What separates a great profile from a mediocre one is usually very subtle. Most people tend to think that elaborate customizations are the signs of a great profile, but usually some websites and applications don’t even allow rigorous customizations.
The elements you have to work with are quite subtle, and even though it is very easy to differentiate between a great profile and a mediocre one, most people can’t quite put their fingers on what exactly separates both kinds of profile.
The simple answer? A great profile follows the basic rules of profile design, while a mediocre one doesn’t.
Essential Design Rules for a Great Profile
Want to make sure your profile is a great one instead of a merely mediocre one? The rules below will certainly help:
Use Appropriate Photo and Cover Image
Most modern profile designs go for simplicity and minimalism. While this may appear limiting to the users, there is still enough you can do with the few customization options available.
For instance, no matter how minimalist the profile is, there will always be opportunities for profile image customizations. A noteworthy point here is to analyze similar profiles in your niche and try to get familiar with the prevalent profile style.
Some niches, for example, require a simple, laid-back picture type, while some demand more professionalism.
Make the Most of Text Fields
After the visual elements like your photo and cover image, the next most important aspect is the text fields. Generally, you want to make the most of this little space, and to do that usually involves the following:
Keep Texts Short and Simple
First thing you want to do for your text fields is to keep things short and simple. But of course you may not have much choice in the matter anyway.
Some profile pages only allow very few words in their bio fields while some don’t even have that option anyway. But the purpose of emphasizing this point is to let you know that no matter how stringent the character limit is in your bio field, you can still do a lot with it.
Highlight Skills and Achievements
The trick is to focus exclusively on the most important things. This includes your skills, achievements, and basically everything that sets you apart from the competition.
And then once you’re done highlighting these things, you should proceed to cut them even further. Ultimately you want to get to a sweet spot where you neither have too much information nor too little. Finding this balance is quite tricky, but it is not impossible.
Make Use of Clear Contact Details
Another thing every profile needs is a clear and concise contact detail. Some profiles allow you to add email addresses, handles for other social media, among others. This can be great for business pages looking to get their products to more customers.
And yes, despite the fact that this should be a no-brainer, you’d be surprised to know that many businesses fail to optimize their profiles with clearcut address and contact details.
Never Forget External Linking
No profile is complete without adding an external link – where it is allowed. There are a handful of reasons why you should always include an external link on your profile pages, the first is that it is an essential feature.
An external link helps you do more with the following you’ve been able to build on the platform in question. For many, to monetize this audience requires directing them to a new external page entirely and that is where external linking comes in.
Secondly, an external link is great for SEO. Search engine crawlers tend to follow profile links not only to index and rank your pages, but to better understand which pages are yours so that they can group them together on result pages.
Thorough Customization
Now while most platforms only allow basic text customizations in bio and username, and basic visual customizations in profile picture and cover image, some take it even further. There are platforms that allow full overhaul of the profile page with complete background customizations and banner images in certain sections.
If you happen to find yourself on such a platform, then by all means, endeavor to do your best to take advantage. You don’t even need to craft a design from scratch on your own if you don’t know.
You can easily hire a professional designer online to make one for you, or visit template sites like Designurbate where you get free, high-quality templates for profile background and banner images.
In Conclusion
Your online profiles can go a long way in helping your business reach audiences that you would not have been able to otherwise. Sadly, thanks to the uniformity of profile designs, it is usually common to see people failing to understand what separates a great profile from a not-so-great one.
As we have highlighted above, the difference is basically in how much a profile is able to follow design rules. The most important of these include using appropriate photos and cover images, keeping text fields short and simple, making use of clear contact details, employing external links, and performing thorough optimizations through background designs.
Follow all of these rules and you should be on your way to having the best profiles in no time at all.