Website design is crucial due to its impact on how visitors will perceive your company. The impression your website leaves on them will either get them to stay on the page and learn more about your business or bounce and turn to one of your competitors. A website designed with your users in mind will help you present yourself well and form a good impression of your brand to prospective customers. It can also help you nurture leads to convert more visitors into paying customers. Perhaps most importantly, a well-designed website offers a solid user experience and helps your audience easily access and navigate your website. You can always hire a Freelance Web Designer, if you don’t want to do the job by yourself.
Let’s talk a little bit more about why web design is essential.
Why Does Good Website Design Matter?
Because your website is the front door to your company, you should ensure the design makes sense and is aesthetically pleasing. Visitors will automatically judge your brand’s credibility based on your website’s look and feel. If it’s unattractive or poorly designed, your potential customers will quickly quit engaging with your company.
You must focus on form and function to ensure your visitors stick around. It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is; if it isn’t designed with form and function, it won’t convert leads into paying customers.
Here’s a breakdown of the top reasons great web design matters:
1. Your Website Serves as Your Company’s First Impression
Your website is often the first encounter people have with your business. People often form opinions about your organization within seconds of coming to your site. This means you have little time to create a lasting impression on your audience. You can do this by ensuring you’re offering them an attractive, user-friendly, and highly responsive website that’s complete with a fast loading speed.
If your site is unappealing or outdated, it’ll make an initial negative impression of your business. This will deter potential customers and redirect them to your competitors’ websites.
On the other hand, if your site is well designed, it’ll help keep your audience on your pages and ultimately enhance lead conversions.
2. A Well-Designed Website Must Have a Unique Mobile Experience
Great design will always keep the end users’ experiences in mind. Be aware that experience is very different on a desktop or laptop screen than on a mobile device. With that said, it’s critical that your website functions well and looks great across all types of devices. Internet activity on mobile officially surpassed desktop use in 2016 and has only increased since then.
Your mobile experience should be:
- Easy to read
- Simple to navigate
- Fun to flip through with a simple swipe of a thumb
If people have to click on tiny links or try to pinch the screen to zoom in, they’ll get frustrated and leave. Remember that mobile-friendliness doesn’t mean simply shrinking everything to fit onto a mobile screen; your site should have an entirely different, tailor-made design for mobile.
3. Your Site’s Design Impacts Your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the game you play with Google and other search engines to be seen by as many searchers as possible. If your site is poorly designed, your SEO efforts will suffer, causing you to lose out on that coveted first-page real estate the search engines offer.
For example, suppose your website has complicated coding or a lot of large images that slow down the load time. In that case, that will deter visitors quickly (known as your bounce rate) and cause negative impacts on your SEO marketing strategies. Sometimes, website designers can get carried away with clever designs or tech that look amazing but ultimately hurt the site’s optimization. It’s important to be mindful of these things and steer clear of elements that can damage your SEO initiatives.
The best way to ensure you’re implementing best practices in web design and search engine optimization is to partner up with a web design agency that understands SEO, too.
4. Your Competitors Have Great Websites
There – we said it. If you still need another good reason to invest in excellent web design, you need to understand that your competitors are already doing so. If you want to remain competitive, you must also use professional web design for your site.
Your website needs to stand out from the rest. If your website is old and outdated, or if you’re providing your audience with a low-quality site, your competitors will rank higher than you. Their well-designed sites will perform better than yours and attract more leads, ultimately creating more revenue for them.
In the End
Great website design isn’t just about what the site looks like (although that certainly is a major component); it’s also about how the users’ experiences round out as a whole. With a bit of thoughtfulness and help from a professional website design team, you can soon win over your potential customers and reap the rewards of your efforts.