Why Website Design Is Important For Small Businesses
Website design is a powerful marketing tool that helps you gain a competitive edge in your niche and mold customer perception. Developing a website offers many benefits such as getting more leads, increasing sales, growing your brand, and improving the customer service experience.
However, most websites don’t set out to achieve anything for their business owners. Why do some websites perform better than others? Many business owners keep asking the same questions, and in more ways than one, they fall for the same pitfalls.
Most websites fail to perform because their web designers don’t know a thing about digital marketing. Your website serves as the first point of contact for prospects, every type of content, piece of communication, and ad that you create will redirect users back to your website. As such, it is important to ensure your website gives users a clear indication of what your brand is all about and what type of products you have for sale.
Your website also doubles as a marketplace where you can send customers to make a purchase or learn more about a particular product or service that you provide. To put it bluntly, prospects are not willing to spend money on a platform that doesn’t inspire confidence.
Websites also serve as a cache of information for your audiences. Whether its blog posts or product descriptions, you need a place to display the information to help prospects find it. Your website is the ideal place to contain all that information you generate to inform and engage your prospects.
Your website also helps with email marketing by carefully using forms to collect customer data. If you are using email marketing to reach and engage prospects, then you need a place where you can send them to convert. Your website is the perfect location for your email subscribers to visit when they want to learn more about a product and want to make a purchase. Many competent businesses have a weekly newsletter that offers a wealth of information to prospects as well as a link back to the website.
You’ll notice many e-commerce businesses routinely send promo emails to their prospects and almost always contain a link back to their main domain. It works more often than not.
What is Website Design?
At its core, website design refers to the design of websites so they would portray information in a certain, deliberate manner for mobiles, desktops, and tablet users. A web designer works on the layout, appearance, SEO, and even content of a website.
The appearance of a website relates to the font, images, and colors used. The layout is the arrangement and categorization of information.
A good website incorporates usability and aesthetics while fitting in line with the user base and brand vision.
The basic trend these days for most websites is to focus on simplicity, so that no irrelevant information may distract or confuse users. As such, the primary goal of a website is to win and foster the trust of the user base, increasing usability, and serving as a source of information.
Speaking of usability, most websites incorporate responsive design so they dynamically load on both desktop and mobile devices.
Making sure the layout is consistent across all devices and screen resolutions is crucial to maintaining user trust and engagement.
How to Design a Website?
While it is certainly possible to use drag and drop builders on WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix, the result isn’t always as the user desires. Many businesses continue to trust and hire a skilled website design company to set up their website. After all, an unattractive layout is enough to turn away as many as 38% of the user base.
Think of your website as one giant sales funnel, it could have the most incredible sales pitch, but if the layout looks horrible, people won’t be interested in buying anything it offers.
If you trace back website design from the early 2000s to present-day 2020, you’ll notice that web design has evolved by leaps and bounds. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to pick up on the latest trends and incorporate them into your website. It’s also important to make a distinction between trends that don’t necessarily apply to you.
These days, most websites are built using coding languages like CSS and HTML, which instruct web browsers how to arrange all the text and images on a site, which colors to use, and where to put media, etc.
In older days, web designers had to hand-code websites from scratch, this means creating every line of HTML and CSS code for each website they made. This made things redundant, painfully slow, and extremely expensive.
Today you have website creation tools to do much of the hard work for you. But our experience tells us that website design should never be relegated to drag and drop builders. It may work in the short run, but it will be hard to truly customize your website based on your exact vision and business goals. It’s a high-wiring act that is best left to an expert website design team.
How Long Does it Take to Design a Website?
The exact time frame for the website design depends on the business’s immediate goals. It is never advisable to rush a website launch and you should only take your website live if you’re properly prepared.
This means:
- Thoroughly testing your website
- Knowing what content is needed and having it ready to go from day 1
The primary reason why most website launches get delayed is because of incomplete content. Launching a half-finished website is not advisable, but content creation isn’t exactly easy. Consider including content strategy when working with a website designer.
In most cases, the average time frame of website design takes anywhere from 2 weeks to 16 weeks, if you’re doing everything for scratch. This includes about 4 weeks of discovery, 5 weeks of design, 4 weeks of development, and about 2 weeks of tweaking. It may take even longer to launch a website if you waited until the very end to generate content.
Your website design company will provide you with a list of dates where deliverables will be ready for review, and the exact date by which you’ll be able to launch. Make sure to add these to your calendar so you’re ready. Always communicate any conflicts with your website design company so they can adjust their schedule accordingly.
Want an expert design team to work on your website? Get in touch with the experts here for a brief consultation.
Mike Mera
We’d Love to Work with You
Whether you’re an established brand or an innovative new start-up, success doesn’t come from a single campaign or strategy. Lasting success comes from understanding your business objectives and partnering together to achieve your goals.