Your business website is where your audience gets to know about your brand and its story, your products or services, and everything you do and offer. That means your website should be welcoming and fully optimized to enjoy maximum conversion rates.
One of the most important elements of a website is its design. If it’s not user-friendly, intuitive, and visually appealing, the audience will be disappointed with their user experience and leave it immediately.
That means you should be well aware of the importance of web design for businesses and know how to leverage its benefits to increase your sales volume.
This is what we will discuss today.
The Importance of Web Design for Businesses
1. Creates Brand Value
By embracing skillful website design you can lay the foundation for creating a reputable brand for your business and you can also add value to an older brand with it.
A great brand starts its journey with brand identity elements like logo, color scheme, and typography. A professional web design company has experts to research and create the best brand elements for a company.
2. Ensures Better User Experience
Nowadays, websites are often the main contact point between a business and its audience. The success of a website relies heavily on its user experience (UX), as a negative UX can discourage visitors and harm the company’s image.
The user interface, accessibility, performance, and functionalities of a website make the overall UX for a website. To ensure a great user experience for your website designers make them attractive and easy to use at the same time.
You need to ensure in-depth user experience research at the initial stage of web designing since the success of your website relies on it.
3. Builds Credibility
You can create credibility for your brand by ensuring a good first impression and seamless user experience.
A professional web designer uses your logo, trademark, and other branding elements on the website with due importance to help increase brand awareness.
Effective web design ensures the website’s adaptivity and responsiveness, which is good for the brand image. The blog section of a website helps establish you as an authority in the industry and you become more credible as a result.
4. Optimizes for Search Engines
Apart from human users, your website also needs to understand the algorithms of different search engines to secure high rankings on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
To ensure that search engines will understand your web content you need to optimize them with the best search engine optimization practices. Only a good web design process can confirm the best SEO practices for your website.
5. Puts You Ahead in the Race
Your website becomes visually intriguing, user-friendly, accessible, engaging, and SEO-enabled with a thoughtful web design. All these qualities ensure fast growth for your business and victory over your competitors.
A professional web design ensures an increase in sales and better brand value at the same time. In short, you always remain one step ahead in the intense market competition.
6. Minimizes Bounce-Backs
The bounce-back rate of your website shows how many visitors land on your website but take leave without making any interaction.
Sometimes users bounce back from a web page if they get all the information and services from a single page. In most cases, bounce-backs happen due to the dissatisfied user which is preventable by a good web design.
After a visitor arrives at your website you expect them to stay a while and know more about your services and products.
Effective web designing helps you reach this goal by creating beautiful first impressions and confirming adequate user engagements.
7. Ensures Proper Security
A web designer ensures the overall data security of the website, protecting the interests of both the site owner and the users. They need to plan where they need to store the data or how to retrieve them safely.
A common practice for web designers is to use the Secure Sockets Layer Certificates (SSL), which lets a website receive and send data in small encrypted files.
Another popular security feature that a web designer may consider is Cloudflare. It is a web application firewall that inspects incoming traffic and blocks suspicious interactions.
The Google Global Content Delivery Network is a security tool that fights severe spam attacks. It is a network of servers that ensure quick and safe access to your website, saving your server from overwhelming traffic.
8. Reduces Loading Time
It can be frustrating for a user to wait for a web page to load, even for a few seconds. In that case, they will take leave from your website, increasing the bounce-back rate.
This is the result of a Statista survey showing the percentages of users leaving a website if the web pages are slow to load. As you can see on average 28% of users quit a website if it takes more than five seconds to load.
More importantly, search engines will not refer to your site if the loading time is too high.
Effective web design can minimize the loading time for a web page by lowering the image resolutions, using a content delivery network firewall, limiting CSS, HTML, and JavaScript codes, and incorporating browser caching.
6 Web Design Essentials
1. Visual Aesthetics
Your website design needs to immediately captivate users since there is fierce competition for user attention among countless other websites.
On average, a user takes only 50 milliseconds to decide whether to stay on a site or not. Visual aesthetics is the key factor that influences a visitor to create the very first impression about your website.
No doubt a functional website can win the user’s heart permanently but only visual aesthetics can ensure that users stay on your website long enough to try the features.
On top of that, a visually appealing website can help you build credibility and increase your brand value by creating a lasting impression on the audience.
2. Affordance
You have used doors to exit or enter a place your whole life. Now if you see a door sign on a website, your brain will instantly know you need to click the sign to enter or exit to some other place on the website. This feature of resemblance is known as affordance in web designing.
Affordance is the clue that helps the user predict the use of an element by its appearance. Designers induce affordance to a web element by creating a web element that resembles a real-life object in appearance.
Website interfaces contain many visual elements that create affordance for actions. When a user sees a horizontal arrow key they understand it is a navigational button.
An effective web design gives importance to affordance and makes the navigation of the website fluid. Affordances can be both explicit and hidden. Examples of hidden affordance are drop-down boxes or pop-up dialogue boxes.
3. Accessibility
In web design, the term “Accessibility” refers to options for providing information and services to people with disabilities.
Ethically speaking, your website should not discriminate against any person for their physical disabilities.
Accessibility can play a significant role in determining the overall reach of your website.
4. Platform-Independence
You never know exactly what device a user may use to access your website. It can be a high-end desktop computer, a smart TV, or a mobile phone.
So you need to ensure that all the visual elements of your website are accessible to all types of devices by practicing adaptivity and responsiveness.
In the adaptive web design approach you create many versions of the user interface for your website and make your final choice after determining the type and model of the device you send.
The responsive web design approach does not create different user interface versions. It allows your website to dynamically adjust its display resolution by detecting the visual settings of the device.
5. User Engagement
Your business website should be able to capture the attention of users encouraging them to explore more of the content and interact more with the site. Along with visual aesthetics and functionality, user engagement makes a direct impact on the success ratio of your website.
You can harness the benefits of user engagement more if you can collect and analyze the data. Sometimes user engagement on your website provides you with the identity and preferences of your audience.
It also tells you when they may become interested in buying your product or service and it helps you adopt an effective marketing strategy a lot.
An efficient way to improve engagement is gamification, where designers ensure user engagement in a sporting manner.
An example of gamification to boost user engagement is the language learning platform- Duolingo.com. Language learners always compete with each other to top a leaderboard in Duolingo.
6. Call-to-Action
When you use an element on your website that directly prompts the user to do something it is called a call to action (CTA) element. Web buttons like ‘Join Now’ or ‘Purchase Today’ are examples of CTA and in most cases you you find them as a button or a hyperlink.
The call to action elements are essential for a webpage because they serve as a guide for users to decide their next course of action. Without a well-defined CTA, the user may feel lost and can leave the site.
A thorough user experience research helps web designers adopt the right call-to-action strategy since the quality of the call-to-action elements can how successful the user engagement will be.
How to Choose a Good Web Design Agency?
Once you know the importance of web design for businesses, it’s time to choose a good web design agency by analyzing their expertise, portfolio, and some other features. Here, we have discussed five aspects that you should take into consideration.
1. Your Requirements
A web design agency can be good for you only if it has the expertise to fulfill your requirements. You should make sure the agency has the expertise to fulfill your website requirements.
2. Agency’s Own Website
Assessing the official website of the web design agency, you can get an idea of how good they are at their job. You should check if the visual elements of the website are catchy enough or not. Inspect the functionality and navigation of the website thoroughly.
3. Company Portfolio
You need to scrutinize the web agency’s portfolio to learn about its background and notable achievements so far. It may help you make your mind up.
4. Testimonials & Reviews
Only the company’s previous clients can tell you exactly how good or bad they are at their services. You can find some testimonials on the web designer’s website. If possible, try to reach some of them in person to know more.
4. Cost
You need to perform a feasibility test on the web project to see if the return on investment (ROI) is more than the web design cost. Discuss the cost with the company to ensure no hidden costs.
Final Thoughts
In the technology-driven business era, your business success depends a lot on how your website looks and acts. A smart and optimized website will unlock many doors of possibilities for you. We believe this article has helped you understand the importance of effective web design to make your online presence more rewarding.
