Every business owner ultimately knows that you have to have a website if you want to get noticed in the national and global marketplace. You may love working within your local community, but if you have products or services that can benefit people in faraway communities, a website is the portal by which your services are found.
This makes the overall design of your website a crucial part of your success. Sure, you could design it yourself, but unless you know the intricate nature of web design and what gets people engaged, your attempts might prove futile at best.
Whether you’re looking for location-specific services like Minneapolis web design or services within a certain price range, you need to make sure the company you choose gives you a design that draws people in. Here, we’ll explore why web design matters and what you should look for in a design.
Why Web Design Really Matters
One fact that most business owners are unaware of is that the design of your site can either be an attractor or a deterrent for a potential customer. Truth be told, poor web design gives a potential customer their initial first impression of you and the quality of work that you’ll produce.
In a study performed at Stanford University, researchers found that 75 percent of people judge a business’s credibility based on their website design alone. This means that if you have a subpar design, broken links, an odd structure, or several elements missing and out of place, your business could suffer.
A quality web design produces a user-friendly experience. A prospective customer should be able to navigate to any page on your site without having to guess where to click. And, the design itself should be inviting and not deter a prospect from engaging with you or your services.
What Exactly is “Good” Web Design?
What comes across as aesthetically appealing is largely a subjective experience. That is to say that you might like the color red and respond to it in a specific positive emotional or psychological way, but this experience will be much different with others.
A good web designer knows how to use color as a tool. Not only color but all of the other elements that are interwoven into creating a responsive design that produces engagement.
Good web design ties all of the elements used to create a website together. This incorporates color scheme, font, typography, layout, white space, headers, footers, sidebars, and navigation tools. The placement of each produces the overall structure of the website design, and if one thing is oddly placed it can throw off the entire structure.
Just as a test, navigate to a few of your favorite websites and see what it is about them that draws you in, or gives you a pleasant experience.
At the same time, check out a few random sites and see what it is that you dislike. Chances are, the structure and layout are unappealing with these sites, and it makes you not want to continue browsing the site. This is the difference between good and bad web design; the desire (or lack of) to keep browsing.
Why You Need a Quality Website
Google basically runs the search engine world. Nearly 80 percent of all web searches go through Google. While this is a startling number, what’s even more startling is the fact that your web ranking on a Google search page will be affected by the design of your site.
The key with Google is that you want to be ranked as highly as possible in order to help drive organic search clicks. Unless you’re listed on the first page of a search engine results page (SERP), you’ll struggle to gain much traffic.
The quality and ease of navigation on your website are factored into Google’s ranking algorithm, making it critical for you to have a quality design incorporated into your site.
When your site is all polished and active, you’ll know if your design is of high quality by the amount of traffic you’re able to bring in, and this is all made possible by the hands of web designers skilled in this art.
