Why Web Design Matters
Understanding web design isn’t just for the people who manage it: having an idea of what it can do for your site, business, or service makes it much easier to fit it into your regular business plan. Whether you run a pet shop or a family law and legal aid firm, there’s no reason to avoid good web design, especially when it might be the main point of contact between you and your customers. But why does it matter so much?
First Impressions
If you were looking for something significant, such as legal aid for dealing with purchasing a house, you’d probably want to look around for the best option you can find. The internet makes searches more accessible than ever before, but it also exposes more to customers who would previously only have blind faith in newspaper advertisements or phone book listings.
If there’s anything that feels off about your business, likely, customers won’t take the risk and move on to somebody else. This can matter more for certain businesses than others: a pet care business doesn’t need anything too fancy, but a tech firm or advertising agency needs to make an excellent first impression to pull in business. A struggling site makes you look like a struggling company.
Tracking
Nobody likes to feel watched without their consent, but a good site design can actually make potential customers more likely to sign up for services that give you their details. This might be an accounting system, a newsletter, a freebee download, or even just somewhere that they can enter their email to get updates on your new releases and services.
User data can go a long way in a short time. Even an email address with no other details can be used as a marketing tool, and it also lets you track how many purchases or interactions that user has been involved with through their account.
Convenience
A common mistake that many people make is assuming that “web design” means “the visual design of a website.” While this is a big part of it, web design can also involve getting a page to load quickly (optimization), getting it to naturally appear in search results (search engine optimization), making everything work fluidly without confusing the user (UI/UX design), and sometimes even simple changes like reducing the number of clicks it takes to reach important pages.
What you’re getting with web design isn’t just small tweaks to how the website looks, but significant adjustments below the surface that have a fundamental impact on the way the site works. A website that looks amazing but barely functions appropriately isn’t a well-designed site.
Long-Term Quality
There’s another element of web design that gets overlooked more than you would think, and that’s how well a site’s design can stand up to the test of time. We’ve all seen websites that haven’t been updated since the mid-2000s, and it’s easy to tell how bad they look relative to modern-day sites. However, some of them were so well-designed that you can barely tell, and they might only have been updated once or twice since they were first launched.
If you make a site that’s a product of its time, then it can quickly become outdated, meaning that more time and money has to go into re-designing it all over again. A good web designer will usually be able to create something that can last in the long-term, even if design trends start changing again in the future.
How Do I Choose a Web Design Company?
Unlike a lot of businesses, you don’t have to choose a local company to get great results. You might decide to go with the best Web Design Surrey has to offer or choose something from a completely different country altogether. If you’re an international company, you might end up picking a company that operates in your main targeted area. It all depends on what they can offer you.
No matter the kind of business you operate, whether you have property, or even if you’re expecting to turn a profit with your website, getting excellent web design support can be the difference between having a robust online presence and getting left in the dust. The only thing worse than no website is a bad website.
