The right Web-Design can make or break your business

You’ve made a website for your company, made sure that it conveys what you offer, but are you still not seeing an improvement in your company’s performance? 

In most cases, this can be attributed to the design of your website. Maybe your website has all that it needs to function, but not what a potential customer might want to see. 

Nowadays, a basic website just to ensure that your company has an online presence is not enough. With millions of internet users browsing through millions of websites, you need to be sure that your’s stands out from the crowd.

How can this be made possible?

The key to a good website is a user-friendly design, and accessibility. 

A well-designed website can help build trust and guide visitors to take action. It can help you form a good impression on your prospective customers.

Web design and Development

Web design and development is, simply, the process of creating a website. 

As the name suggests, Web design determines the look and feel of a website, by designing the layout, usability, and visual appearance of a website. Web development means to build and maintain the core structure of a website, which determines how a website functions.

Elements of good Web-design

Your customers care about design. Whether consciously or not, people react to visuals, and are naturally drawn to good ones. Users quickly judge your business based on visuals alone, and will often stop using your site if it’s poorly designed.

So, what are some of the elements that you should consider while improving the quality of your website’s design?

#1. User-friendly

When you place the user at the core of your design and content, your site will automatically become more user-friendly.
Usually, users bounce from a website that has too much information scattered around, and no way to navigate through them. Making your website simple, easy to navigate, and accessible, are the main factors that will keep a user interested and maybe even revisit your website.
Observe what your users are most responsive to, and take into consideration those elements that garner the most attention. Incorporate these elements into your website design.

#2. Responsiveness

Whether the user is on a 21-inch desktop computer, a 13-inch laptop, a 9.7-inch tablet, or a 5.5-inch mobile phone, your website must fit the size of the screen or browser window.

This makes having a responsive layout becomes even more critical. Your site must look good and be at its best when it comes to functionality, on both desktop and mobile. 

Think back to when Tumblr was at its peak, the desktop site was more functional and easy to navigate than through mobile. Users found it difficult that they had to zoom-in and out to see the contents, making their mobile users lose interest. 

Mobile phones and tablets are responsible for 56.74% of global internet usage. It has now become crucial to create a consistent, yet tailored experience, across every device.

Sites like GitHub, DropBox, Wired, and Shopify are prime examples of excellent responsive websites that provide seamless user experience and are capable of adapting to any device. 

#3. Color

A good website perfectly balances beauty and clarity. 

The color palette that you choose must make sense for your industry. Wouldn’t it be weird if a financial institution has pops of neon-pink scattered on their website? And it would be so bland and tasteless to use a warm color-palette with a lot of beige tones, for showcasing the work of a spray-paint artist. 

The contrast between the background and text needs to be correctly set so that the visitor can read text easily and not strain the eyes.

All of these depend on the color of your website. Now you know the importance of a good color palette.

#4. Layout

Imagine having beautifully curated content on your desktop site, only for its mobile users to find them overlapping or have its important areas cropped out, and placed in such a way that the user cannot appreciate or find value in it? 

This is why Layout matters. It doesn’t have to be the exact same on all devices, but it must be attractive and easily accessible. Your visitors must be able to find what they are looking for, and find it at its best quality, without having to zoom in or out or scroll in different directions.

#5. Contact information

An interested visitor might look everywhere for a way to get in touch with you, through your website. But if your contact information is insufficient, or incorrect, it can greatly affect the performance of your business. 

It is important to provide all the information that a potential customer might need to contact your company. This includes all your social media handles, important links, accurate address and phone number, email addresses etc. preferably at the end of your website. 

This will make a visitor go through your website to get to the contact information, allowing them to glance through your content. 

#6. Speed

Speed is an important element of web design. It ensures that your page loads quickly, so your audience can access information fast.

Your web design has to be fast to keep users on-site, which in turn boosts your SEO ranking. If users get fed up waiting for your site to load, they’re going to leave in just a few seconds. Search engines analyze your website and conclude that you’re giving users a bad experience, lowering your search engine rank as a result. 

As a digital marketing company, we provide Page speed services. This allows you to reap the benefits of a fast loading page, while focusing on running your business.

Importance of web design and development

By now, you’re familiar with the elements of a good website. But what do these elements do for your website? Let us explain why they are so important. 

#1. First Impressions are, in-fact, the best

The first few seconds that your visitor spends on your website are the most crucial, because in these seconds, your visitors make the decision whether to stay or leave. Therefore, it’s important to give them the best impression and a positive impact, and it mostly depends on the visuals of your website. 

If the images you use are of low quality, or the written content is difficult to read or understand, or if you use too much content that is not relevant or related, then your visitors will lose interest almost immediately. They will leave your website and go to that of a competitors’. 

Your website sets the first impression of your company. 

It’s important to ensure that visitors have a great experience on your website, so that they have a good impression and may even refer your company to their friends, thereby increasing your popularity.

#2. Stand out from Competitors

Your competitors may already be working on getting their visitors’ attention, so it’s important for your website to stay on top of the competition by designing and developing your website to be one-of-a-kind. 

The first thing is to see what you’re up against, then come up with something that is entirely new and different from what’s already being used by the others, this will set your website apart. 

This can be a simple element, such as the overall color-palette of your website, the written content, the images used, the animations, the downloadable content, or anything else. Your site’s aesthetics, usability, and any other crucial factors are essential to giving your company a competitive edge. 

Conducting thorough competitor research and coming up with a strategically designed and developed website can help to set you apart from the others, achieve better results, and ultimately drive business growth, ensuring long-term online success. 

#3. Build trust with your visitors

A potential customer judges your company by the way it is presented through your website. A properly designed and developed website will give them the feeling that you are trustworthy and credible, and will believe in what you offer to your customers. 

Think from a customer’s point of view: would you like to buy from a website that has credible information, good reviews, and shows up on google easily, or would you rather purchase from a sketchy-looking website that has jumbled-up information, scattered images, or just a basic, plain layout, and not to mention, shows up on the tenth page of a google search? 

Customers subconsciously associate well-designed and functional websites with trustworthiness, and will be compelled to stay or revisit such websites. If your website lacks elements that showcase these qualities, then you will lose visitors, which will bump your website to lower rank where it will be harder to find by users.

#4. Aids in search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is critical to visibility in terms of search rankings, and web development is vital to making this happen. SEO influences search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engines such as Google,Yahoo,Bing etc, use artificial intelligence to analyze websites for evidence of certain criteria, the presence of which will result in such websites to rank higher in search engine results pages.

Complex navigation for the user makes it confusing for both the user and for search engines. It is recommended that the pages should be no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage of your website. This will help your site’s SEO by allowing search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible. 

Responsiveness to mobile access has become an essential element of SEO rankings, as most customers use their smartphones to access the internet. If customers cannot use a mobile version of your website, they’ll move on to a competitor’s site. 

Web design and SEO both play a part in developing an SEO-optimized website. An ideal website design will include elements such as ease of navigation, usability, speed, keyword usage, and mobile-friendliness, which add to how well the website is optimized. 

You’d want potential customers to see your organization ranked on the first page, preferably at the top of the page of a search engine’s result.It is of utmost importance that search engine optimization (SEO) be implemented for your websites to even be found.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

Certain performance indicators have no set criteria by which performance of your website can be measured. Professional developers often combine the elements of design and use their expertise to measure such KPIs to benefit your company. 

Our team of developers can look after your website and measure its performance, ensuring that your website attains success in the business objectives set by you. 

The following is a list that includes certain Key Performance Indicators that can be used to measure the success of your website:

#1. Bounce rate

According to Wikipedia, “Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.” 

If the bounce rate is high, it means that the entry page of your site is uninteresting to your visitors, and that they click out and go to other websites. Since there are millions of websites representing different industries, there are no benchmarks set to determine the bounce rate most appropriate for an industry.

#2. Average Time on Page

This measures the average amount of time spent on a single page by all users of a website. This metric only measures the average time spent by users on non-exit pages. An exit page is the last page of a website session.

A good Average Time on Page depends on many factors, including device type, industry, target audience type. When used correctly, with the help of an expert, this metric can give insight into how engaging your content is to your audience.

#3. Onsite Search

People looking for a specific category or topic, even an exact product or service want to know within one click if you have it. These visitors will immediately look for a site search box (also known as internal site search functionality).

The placement of your search bar will dictate its usage rate. If it’s not easily found, you’d be making your users search for the search box- resulting in them losing interest and leaving your website.  This can be solved with proper website designing- by placing the search box where it’ll be easily found and used.

Encouraging visitors’ searches with prompts such as:

• “Search today’s news”,
• “Find events” 
• “Enter product, code or brand”
• open-ended questions such as “What are you looking for?”

Can help to guide visitors about what they can search for on your site.

How we can help you

At Eighty Six Media, we understand the value of your business. 

Our team of dedicated and creative experts work with clients to design and construct visually creative and user-focused websites that attract and engage target audience. 

We provide a range of customized services including website design and development, branding, advertising, social media marketing, and more.