Why Web Design Is So Important? If you have a business or other professional creative pursuits but don’t have a website, then you are missing out on a lot of great opportunities. Your website is the representation of the products or services that you offer. It’s the place where most people will interact with you for business.
It consists of many variables like layout, content, graphic, search engine optimization, and conversion rate optimization for web designing. While web design is a significant and essential part of your promotional efforts, many businesses forget that it’s just one part of an overall digital marketing plan and should be consistent in look, feel and purpose with your other marketing efforts.
Your website is a great marketing tool that offers several benefits.
5 Key Components of Effective Web Design
1. Brand Consistency. First impressions count — how does your website stack up? The look and feel of your website should be compatible with all other marketing materials, including whitepapers and product sheets. Is your branding communicating the right message about your business? Brand consistency ensures that your brand is easily recognizable across all marketing channels and touchpoints. Creating a cohesive, consistent brand identity and a unified experience for existing and potential customers.
A few things to consider include:
- Logo
- Colors
- Font
- Types of images
- Overall messaging
To foster lifelong customers, companies need to build trust through brand consistency. The more consistent your brand is, the more recognizable it is to consumers, providing a feeling of reliability. Brand consistency helps your customers get to know your brand on a more personal level.
Navigation. Website navigation (a.k.a., internal link architecture) is the links within your website that connect your pages. Your website navigation is one of the primary ways search engine crawlers find and crawl your content.
Search engines use your website navigation to discover and index new pages. Links help search engines understand the content and context of the destination page and the relationships between pages.
Conversely, incomplete or overly crowded website navigation can make it harder for crawlers to find important pages, or dilute link equity. When search engines understand your site’s navigation, they are more likely to display it to the qualified end-users searching for your keywords.
Businesses that do not emphasize a website’s user experience (UX) may overlook the connection between navigation and search optimization and, as a result, miss out on potential profits. Unfortunately, since the two truly are not that different, the tenants for creating great UX also overlap with the rules for optimizing SEO.
User Experience (UX). Your website is the core anchor for your digital marketing efforts when it comes to marketing. Designing a great website is key, but user experience requires understanding the problems different visitors have to solve.
For example, one of the most frustrating experiences for website users is waiting for a page to load. More and more people are using their mobile devices to access content worldwide. Consumers’ attention spans are very short; a slow page load is an interrupting experience for the user, and it can be a source of frustration and cause them to bounce.Did you know that 51% of online shoppers in the US say that site with a slow page load is one of the top reasons they would abandon a purchase? Remember, User Experience in website design enhances user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interaction with the website.
Google offers a free service where you can get information on your page speed. Get your score and suggestions on making your website faster through Google’s online tool.
Analytics. With a website, you constantly need to review it. There is no such thing as a perfect website. It will need to adapt and change continually. Utilizing website analytics, you can track who referred most traffic to your business site, analyze, and focus on strategies to gain more referrals from them.
For example, if your site receives the most traffic from search engines, your site’s SEO is strong. You can improve your website’s online visibility and gain more traffic than ever before with little extra effort.
It’s important to ensure that your website is set up so that you can effectively collect the data you require. With the potential of Google Analytics, a website designed with such an infrastructure can effectively record the necessary information. However, it does require customization to your tracking and some advanced techniques to ensure you can achieve the measurement you desire.
With analytics, you can easily measure the success of your new website and digital marketing strategy as a whole.
SEO. A great website with no visitors is just a waste and a shame. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will help drive traffic to your site. In addition, having relevant site content will connect you with new customers.
SEO and content planning. One of the most common reasons companies overhauls their website is to make it more search engine friendly. Having quality content that isn’t duplicated should be part of every SEO strategy. Having duplicate content on multiple pages can kill your search engine rankings. Updated content through a company blog is another way to drive traffic to your site and improve your ranking.
For example, let’s say you launch a site to sell car parts in the Tri-City area. When your customers Google “car parts Tri-City,” you want your site’s content to be recognized by Google as an appropriate match and include your site URL on the first page of the search results. Incorporating tracking and site analytics programs will give you insight into what’s happening on your website, from traffic metrics to keyword searches. Tracking also helps target your potential customers, generate relevant ads, and create a higher-converting website.Search engines, like Google, use programs to determine where your website will appear in the search results. Google is constantly updating its algorithm to calculate the website’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Therefore, it’s essential to keep up with Google’s major updates.
Conclusion
Web design can have a huge impact on your digital marketing strategy. Taking the wrong steps in the web design process may affect your brand image. Make sure no area of digital marketing suffers and cover all aspects of your strategy.
Web design plays an important role, from website branding to SEO to social media outreach. Putting efforts without having proper knowledge may create a negative impact. Therefore, it’s advisable to consult a web design and digital marketing company to guide you through conversion.
If you are considering your first website or want to refresh an existing one, we can help make your website experience great.
