Good web design is important for every business. To find out why we will look at 6 reasons why good web design is important for your business in 2023.
First Impressions & Branding
In 2023, your website is almost certain to be the very first visual your potential clients will have of your business. First impressions matter. It is therefore clear that your business’s website needs to have a layout and design, which is consistent with your brand and your target audience. Add to this, a layout which feels intuitive and natural for your visitors to use. Think of your website as your physical shop floor.
You need to leave your website visitors in no doubt about what your business offers and how your visitors can simply access your offerings. This can be achieved by creating clear and concise content, paired with calls to action (CTAs) to encourage them to engage with your business.
Good and clear navigation is important to allow the visitors to easily navigate your website, getting to the products or services they want from you – and you want them to buy!
Good web design will furthermore ensure that the website uses crisp images and that each page’s real estate is used to maximum benefit, giving the website visitor an enjoyable browsing experience. Giving a poor visitor experience will most likely end with the visitor leaving the website before they have even had a chance to investigate your products or services. You could compare this to a car dealer’s premises: from which dealer would you feel safest and happiest buying a second-hand car – the back-street dealer with an unkempt yard full of old cars; or a dealer with a well-looked after and modern forecourt and showroom? The same analogy is true of websites. First impressions matter very much in a highly competitive arena.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Many websites are built for the look and layout alone, with no thought being put into getting the website found by potential customers. In other words, the website may look great, but nobody is able to find it through organic search, because no thought has been put into the optimization of the content for search. Most web designers are not experienced with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or offer it as a premium additional service.
We believe that SEO should be at the core of every website and is as important as the design of the website itself. To give another motoring analogy, a website without SEO is the equivalent of a car without an engine or gearbox – useless.
When commissioning a new website, make sure that the web design agency is competent with SEO best practices and that the website will be built with SEO at the forefront of the build process. SEO is a complex and wide-ranging topic, which you can read more about in our SEO Guide For Business Owners.
Using and configuring structured data for your website is an important consideration to help search engines better understand your website. Structured data is not used efficiently by many websites, so you can find an added advantage if you use this small part of SEO well.
Trust In Your Business
Trust is of great importance if your website visitors are to convert to clients. On a website, trust comes in various different forms. In its most basic form, trust can be as simple as how well presented the website is, as we have already discussed in the First Impressions section above.
However, on different levels, trust can be built well with fairly simple methods. For example, displaying reviews or testimonials prominently on your web pages shows your visitors that clients have had a good experience with your business. If you have reviews on third-party platforms such as Trustpilot or Google Reviews, these can be used to good effect too.
Reviews or comments from your social media feeds can also be a good way to let website visitors gain trust in your business, especially if you are actively engaging with clients on social media.
Another way of providing your visitors with trust is to display the logos of professional associations you may be a member of, together with a link to your entry page. Showing that you or your business is a member of a professional association tells your visitors that you have to have achieved a minimum bar of competence and excellence to be able to be a member of that organization. This helps build trust.
If you have had Press or media exposure, there is nothing like being able to show that your business has appeared in the media by displaying the media company’s logo and a link to the article, soundbite or video.
A good web designer will use a combination of the above methods of building trust in your website.
Consistency of Your Brand
Consistency is important for any web design project. The primary consistency you will want to have on your website is that every page follows a look and layout which is uniform across the website. This will include a colour scheme matching your brand, buttons, fonts, links and sections consistent in their styling.
However, consistency goes beyond just the website. Think of your external marketing (brochures, ads, mailshots,…). In most cases, the marketing will take the target person to your website. It is crucial that the styling of your marketing and your website match, or you will end up giving mixed and inconsistent messages to the people you are trying to encourage to buy your goods or services.
The best businesses and brands have taken painstaking trouble to make their brand stand out amongst the crowd, by being consistent and excelling in their images.
Keep Ahead of Your Competition
Good web design is also important for your business for one major factor, which is outside your control. Your competition.
Your competition, if it is worth its salt, will be continuously striving to make their website better than yours and better than their other competition. It is therefore not a level playing field. You need to do the same.
Web design and SEO are never-ending topics. Good web design, where you are continually improving your website, will help keep your website fresh and in the top spots of the search results.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, businesses have seen a dramatic shift in how business is done. Consumers, especially, expect to be able to do most things online. This ranges from shopping online (eCommerce), booking appointments through your website, accessing services online and much more. If you are not already maximising what you are able to offer your clients online, then now is the time to start to do so and, if necessary, have your website redesigned from the ground up.
A good web design agency will be able to help you do this with positive results for your business.
Converting Websites
Conversions are a much talked about topic for websites. However, do you know if your website is actually converting properly? Conversions are the process of turning a website visitor into a paying customer, or a high-quality lead. Too many web designs concentrate on the styling of the website and fail to properly take into account the business needs of selling the products or services.
High converting websites will have a great balance of styling, layout, content and CTAs. Does yours?
Having the right elements in place to achieve conversions is all well and good, but you need to be able to measure them. This can be done through the integration of services such as Google Analytics and Tag Manager into the website. When properly configured, Google Analytics and Tag Manager can provide you with extraordinary levels of information about how your website is performing. If your business uses that data well, you can tweak your website to optimize it for conversions.
Where To Find A Good Web Designer For Your Business
Cotswold Websites are experienced web designers and digital marketers, who build websites with your business in mind. Each website is optimized for both search and conversions. We also work with many of our clients on a long-term basis, tweaking and improving the individual web pages over the months and years to give them the best chance of ranking and converting well for the long term.
Why not contact us to discuss your website, or use the button below to request a free review of your website and digital marketing? We look forward to hearing from you.
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About The Author
Christopher White
Christopher White is the founder of Cotswold Websites. An accredited digital marketer and website designer, he has over 18 years of experience in creating bespoke websites.
With a background in international logistics and business analysis, Christopher uses his business experience to advise organisations how their website can and should work for them, along with helping them implement business strategies to use Digital Marketing techniques to boost their public exposure.