Today, you will learn why high-quality web design is important for your business.
The five focus areas we will cover today are:
- Your website is judged by its cover
- Your web design has an impact on SEO
- Your web design is correlated with user experience
- Your web design affects user engagement
- Your web design helps improve conversion
You have to think of your website as a business establishment—with proper lighting, spacing, and product line up. A physical store that is badly designed tells so much about the owners and the quality of its service or products.
In the online world, your website is your store, even if it is just a blog. The way it looks, how it works, where the buttons are placed—all of these makeup for good user experience.
Let us take a look at how web design affects your business.
Your Website is Judged by Its Cover
First impressions last. This is as real as it can get. If you have been inside a restaurant that is dirty, chances are you will not appreciate the food no matter how good it is.
If your website is amateurish, it does not take a long while for a site visitor to leave. Your choices of color, border placement of buttons, font styles and sizes all have something to do with what site visitors think about your website.
Once a user sets foot in your website, they will make a judgement about your credibility in a matter of seconds. This judgement does not come from an objective point of view—it comes from rather a subjective perspective, which all boils down to how your website looks.
It is during these first seconds that your website must make a long, lasting, and positive impression. If your website is not appealing, site visitors will not feel excited, much less be motivated to buy what you offer.
Professional web design helps people decide if they are going to stay or leave—all because of how impressed they are.
Your Web Design has an Impact on SEO
Search engines are not humans—they rely on programs, or algorithms, to judge how to index a website. Search engines rely on what your website tells them, and bad web design will not be able to communicate well with the search engine.
This is crucial, as search engines like Google rely on your website content as far as how they will rank your website in the search engine results page or SERP.
A professionally done web design incorporates seo elements such as meta-tags and meta-titles. While most people think that SEO should only be applied to blog content. This is not true. Your tagline, slogan, page title, page descriptions—all of these are crucial to SEO.
With high-quality themes, which are mostly always paid ones, the best practices in terms of SEO, are already embedded in the theme’s code. As a web administrator, you no longer have to worry about these things if your theme has baked SEO in its design.
It is not just the words that matter, but the theme code itself. The website’s code has to be SEO-friendly so it can communicate with search engines and get properly indexed.
Your Web Design is Correlated with User Experience
Have you ever been to a website where you just do not know where to find information? Amateur websites place their navigation menus in various weird places. Some do not even have a menu!
Your header menus, footer menus, buttons, ad placement, all of these have something to do with your customer’s user experience.
The only thing that matters as far as site visitor satisfaction is concerned is an effortless experience.
Your website must be designed in such a way that the user must not have any difficulty browsing and exploring your website. If a person wants to find out if you have something for sale, then it must be easily accessible and viewable somewhere.
Any user who has to exert a lot of effort to find what he is looking for is going to feel exasperated and unhappy. And if a site visitor is not happy, he is not likely to register for your subscription program, let alone buy things that you offer.
Make sure that the priority of your web design elements is user experience—consumers should be able to easily find things that matter to them.
Your Web Design Affects User Engagement
Bad design makes consumers leave. It also makes people feel less engaged. What you want is a website that encourages people to click, comment, buy, read your blogs, or view your offers.
But how will they do this if your web design does not incorporate engagement?
The engagement has something to do with the layout. There is a reason why the comment section is at the bottom of the page, and there is also a reason why email subscription forms are shown via pop-ups or at the top or bottom of a page, not in the middle.
These are design elements that are intended to improve user engagement. If your engagement apps and sections are carefully placed in strategic areas, you can expect better engagement rates.
Just imagine if a person wants to comment on your blog, but this comment section is on the sidebar. This in itself is weird, and it is a tad difficult for a user to read through comments. And if there is no comment section at all, how can you expect your users to engage?
Your buttons must also be placed in the right areas. For one, your call-to-action buttons must be above the fold. If you cannot place the CTAs above the fold because you have a lot to explain before a customer can act, then make sure that you put CTAs in strategic areas on your landing page.
Your Web Design Helps Improve Conversion
If there is no buy button, how will a customer buy? If the email subscription box is nowhere in sight, how will a site visitor register?
Web design not only affects the engagement rate, but it also makes an impact on conversion rate. Even if you are not selling anything right now, it is still likely that you have an email subscription form.
A site visitor who subscribes to your email list is a conversion in itself. A badly designed website is not enticing enough to convince a customer to give you his email address or read your blog, much less improve your traffic even if you have great content from an affordable writer.
Summary
As you can see, how your website looks and how your website works are the two key components of success. A badly designed website makes a customer leaves, with little to no interaction. Professional web design is not good to have—it is a MUST-have.
Never compromise your website’s performance and appearance. Do not settle for free themes that you cannot edit or improve. It is never a bad decision to pay for a theme. Choose one that is fast, easily editable and one that has SEO in the design.
As a final thought, you have to work with a professional web design expert to get a high-quality website. If not, you have to at least shortlist paid themes that you can use.
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