Why is Website Design Important Now
Why is website design important? 94% of first impressions for a brand’s website are design-related. First impressions will cause users to give the website a try or look for other options, i.e. a competitor’s better designed website. Well designed websites will get better traffic and more sales than badly designed websites. The three things we’ll cover for why is website design important are:
- What is Website Design?
- Who’s affected by Website Design.
- Benefits of Having Excellent Website Design.
Why is Website Design Important
What is Website Design
Websites are one of the top ways consumers interact with a brand. If a brand doesn’t have a website, most people don’t trust that brand. Users also judge how credible a brand is and if they are trustworthy by the design of the website. They are looking for a beautiful website that is easy to use and works perfectly every time.
Who’s affected by Website Design
The main people who are affected by a website’s design are the consumers, potential business partners, employees of the brand, IT department (some designs are easier to maintain and update than others) and the owners of the brand and/or website. The various people that are using the website are looking for and need to find:
- Information about the Brand
- Product/Services of the Brand
- How to Contact the Brand
- A List of Jobs that applicants can read and apply to
- FAQs organized by category
Why is Website Design important? Benefits of Having Excellent Website Design
Benefits of having excellent website design include:
- Enticing Leads and Converting them
- Focuses User Attention
- Builds Brand Awareness
- Boosts Sales
- Raises Usability of the site and its Features
- Makes a Glamourous User Experience
Elements of Website Design
Images
Most people are visual learners so they like to have visual cues that indicate what to look at or where to go. Do this by reinforcing your call to action with images and logos. This includes cartoons, graphics, and photographs (yes, stock images too). Since most people are visual learners, use beautiful yet relevant images to reinforce your call to action.
Make sure that the image that you use is not overwhelming or distracting from the text (also making sure that the text is easy to read; you may need to adjust the contrast of the image for this).
Colors
Make sure there is good contrast between colors and keep in mind the color-blind when choosing colors (look up common types of color blindness for this). The best colors for design of a website newsletter depend on what the website is for, who will be using it, and what the tone of the site and the owners want and like.
More professional websites usually have neutral/cooler colors as their main colors with a primary or secondary color for accent to give a formal/subdued feeling. For a more casual and comfortable tone, websites usually have more warm and brighter colors to make their users more calm and relaxed.
Branding
Branding helps make the brand feel unique and notable from the competition. Good branding encourages users to trust the brand and use it often.
A logo is a graphic symbol or sigil for a person, place, or company that aids in brand recognizability and trust. It usually consists of a familiar shape or object with vivid colors to catch consumer’s and potential business partner’s eye. It makes your brand stand out from your competition and builds brand identity. For marketing purposes, it makes it easier to tell what you do, what your values are, why consumers should favor your brand, etc. It helps distinguish your posts and other content on social media from other brands. As well as making your brand more recognizable, having a logo makes you/the brand seem more professional and trustworthy to consumers.
A slogan is a catchphrase or memorable set of words that reflect a brand’s values and purpose and/or advertise their specialty. A mission statement is a declaration of what the brand hopes to accomplish or why they were formed. Both should tell something about the brand and why user’s should care about it or why they should trust them. Make it clear and honest at the least; bonus points if you can write it witty or humorously while advertising your brand.
Navigation/Layout
The first element of good usability for websites is getting around the site. Whether we’re talking about the layout of a page or the entire site, a layout is the path a user travels to find what they are looking for (most of the time a user is on a site for a specific purpose rather than just curiously exploring). Find the items or actions that users most want to find or complete (possibly by using a red route matrix) and make sure that it is easy and clear for your users to find and complete them.
No matter what your website is for there are a couple or a few pages that are either the most profitable or are most important for your users (or better yet, both). Make clear, honest, yet tantalizingly described blocks for your best pages to help guide users to them. Do not make them click-baity by overselling them or put advertising for them everywhere; that just annoys your users. Make it bold and clear to get user attention and understanding, but be respectful of their time and attention span.
As a general rule, keep 3-5 similar elements and items together. Make sure that the way you organize/categorize elements is logical and easy to pick up on. This helps with the feeling of unison in the design and gives a sense of what to expect that helps users find things easily. You may want to make an organization graph of your method and elements to make sure everything is easy to find and the method is intuitive to users. Also, use proper information architecture organization to make details easier to find.
Menus are like salt; use enough that you can tell that they are there but not so much that it overwhelms everything around them (and the customer as well). Place the main menu at the top of the site, and make sure it is on just about every page. Place a footer menu at the bottom of the site; this should have either less options than the main menu or many more options, containing less used pages. It largely depends on the size of the website.
SEO
Search engines have algorithms that ‘crawl’ through a site and index the information and content it finds there. Indexing is the method that search engines use to organize and rank information and content. They do this by going through individual pages for keywords and topics (and alt text, more on that later) to identify relevant information. As such, websites that want to appear in search engine’s results must not only be ‘crawlable’ but also be optimized for indexing or search engine optimization (SEO). For other ways to make a website design SEO, try our SEO tips for beginners.
Summary
Well designed websites will get better traffic and more sales than badly designed websites. The three things we’ll cover for why is website design important are:
- What is Website Design?
- Who’s affected by Website Design.
- Benefits of Having Excellent Website Design.
