It’s 2019 and every business owner is looking to improve their online presence with their business website.
How your website is designed is critical to how you reap the benefits of having an online presence.
Web design is quite broad and usually involves a different layout. The way a website is designed depends on the niche market that the business falls under. An educational resource platform will feature more texts than images while a fashion store will feature more images than texts. An eCommerce website will need additional plugins for cart functionality, order fulfillment and the installation of a payment processing system.
A successful website design project ensures prospects see the information they were looking for and the design does not get in the way of the content. The design has to be aesthetically pleasing, fully functional – without many complications and slower load speed. The search engine robots also prioritize websites with functional designs above poorly designed websites in the search results.
The website design process is a thoughtful and creative process that requires technical knowledge and years of experience. If you are looking to attract visitors to your website, you should consider web design Greenville SC.
Before you go on to hire a website design company, you should read these points that will serve as a guideline on what a website design company should prioritize when designing your website.
User-Friendly navigation
If you are a business offering multiple services, you will want to create different pages for each service. This is where navigation comes to play. The navigation feature includes a labeled navigation bar or a menu drop-down that reveals the service pages of your website. A user-friendly navigation helps visitors understand your website quicker and better. The more the minutes a visitor spends trying to find certain pages or words, the less likely they come back to take an action. A good website design company knows the importance of a user-friendly navigation.
Text to Design Congruence
Publishing appealing text and images goes beyond fonts and stock photos. A seasoned and creative website designer will utilize different fonts, typographic elements and slides to make your website more appealing. The way a text is displayed can the attention span of a reader – your prospects in this case.
While the use of font, custom images, and vectors and more are needed, it’s important that the website designer does not over-apply these features. Text to design congruence is extremely important. If the design elements are too much, it may distract the users from the information in the text, if the texts appear everywhere with no design elements or white space, then it becomes a long boring read.
It’s easy for a web designer to take his/her eyes off the ball and get too entrenched in aesthetics that he/she forgets functionality is a key ingredient to a successful website design project.
Content Structure
While this is not in the wheelhouse of a website design company, it’s important for a website designer to understand the role of content in brand visibility. How the content is displayed and integrated into the pages is very critical to a successful website design project. Most people start reading from the upper left region – just like our hardcover books. It will be highly disturbing and counter-intuitive for the web designer to start displaying the content from the upper right or lower left area.
SEO-friendliness
How the website designer understands SEO friendliness can also make or mar the website design project. Seasoned website designers add keywords in HTML text for popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These keywords help robots understand what the website is all about, which affects search visibility in the long run.
Social Media Integration
Social media has taken over the world. Facebook has recorded over 2 billion users and Instagram is closing in on 1 billion users. If you are going to include a call to action button or offer a blog sharing feature, it’s important to integrate your social media share buttons for visitors to share and interact with you on social media. This feature can help boost your business’s social media visibility which is also good for SEO.
Designing a website is both art and science. It requires the discerning eye of a maestro and empathy from the user’s perspective. An experienced website designer knows the best features and also avoids certain practices that may harm the business’s reputation or reduce its SEO value.
Website design can make or mar your company’s reputation. It’s better to invest in a good web design agency and enjoy the benefits from scratch than starting with a run-of-the-mill provider and later spend more money.
