We know for certain that a website can elevate your business. The stats have always been in its favour. It is said that almost a soaring 90% of your potential consumer uses the internet to find out about a local business. Which could even be yours! While most consumers perform detailed online research on products and services before making their final purchase decisions, a study by the eCommerce Foundation has pointed out that 88% of buyers will most likely search for the relevant product information before buying it online.
Now that is how important a website can be! But what about its design?
Similar studies point out that,
“38% of people will stop engaging with a site if it has an unappealing design”
(fitsmallbusiness.com/website-statistics/)
Purchase behaviour emphasizes the value of a content-rich site that can deliver as per the promise, professionally designed and with enhanced usability for the overall business. Here are some of the ways how a good web design impacts your business.
1. Serves as the First Impression for your business
Potential customers get their first impression of any company, even yours, by having a glimpse of the website. They are then able to form an opinion about your business and in most cases make a purchase decision. So the primary goal should always be aimed at leaving a lasting positive effect on your potential audience within these few seconds of their visit. This can be done so by making sure your website is appealing, highly responsive, has a fast loading speed and is user-friendly in general.
A site that appears unattractive and lacks in user interactivity creates a negative first impression of your brand. It can even ward off potential customers and in turn, drive them to your competitor’s page.
2. Build Trust and Brand Consistency
As mentioned above, your website design ultimately determines how most people will set out to judge the integrity of your business. Trendy and professional website designs automatically promote trust among your consumers. Outdated and unprofessional web designs, on the other hand, can push your consumers to doubt your credibility. Brand consistency is yet another notable way that a decent web design encourages trust. Consumers also tend to recognize prominent and successful brands by simply looking at things like their colours, logos, or styles. Which is all the more, a signature statement for the brand. So it’s important to ensure that these things that your customers identify your business with are well reflected in your website design to maintain the brand image.
3. Enhances Usability
A good website design allows its visitors to effortlessly access what they’re searching for from the website. In other words, your website should contain all the relevant information, without leading the customer elsewhere. A good web design makes these factors extremely easy to find.
In other cases, your website may work well, but a poor design may make visitors feel lost and difficult to use or locate what they want. Users are most likely to enjoy using an aesthetically-pleasing site far more than a monotonous looking site even if the two websites are very much identical when it comes to functioning. That means a good website design can effortlessly enhance usability.
4. Easy and Effortless Navigation
A high-quality design can truly make your site easy to navigate. Most professional designers tend to apply Hick’s Law when it comes to a proper website design. This law states that the overall duration taken to make a decision is directly proportional to the number of available choices. So if you are provided with many choices, you’ll take longer to make a decision, and vice versa.
When professional designers build website navigation with Hick’s Law in mind, they want to simplify and reduce the number of options so that visitors can easily decide what action to take or where to go. Make your site easy to navigate by reducing the number of options to five or less. Take a look at your product menu and merge similar options into a single option. That way, visitors will find your website easy to navigate and easy to use.
5. Fosters Your SEO Strategy
Various web design components and techniques that comprise a successful SEO strategy have a huge impact on your site’s content. . To enhance the overall visibility of your page, make use of strategic SEO-friendly web-design elements and techniques. If you don’t possess the needed skills in this realm, you can always hire an SEO agency who will be able to optimize your website for the SERP and drive organic traffic to your website.
6. Improves Website Loading Speed
A well-optimized website tends to be able to load quickly on all devices as well as desktops. A page will typically load in a matter of seconds due to the fluid grids and high-quality, responsive visual media. Undoubtedly, a visitor is more likely to stay longer on websites that can load faster as compared to that which takes ages to load.
7. Reduces Bounce Rates
A bounce rate refers to the percentage at which users would visit a specific website and then probably abandon it after checking out only one page. By spending more time on your website, you are inviting your visitors to a wide range of other pages on your website, learn more and at most, your business, your products, and perhaps even towards making a purchase.
8. Improves Conversion
A good website design allows you to enter your audience’s eyes and then direct them to where you want them to be. Leveraging this advantage, you can drive as much traffic to special offers, promotions, and even that all-important call to action. You can also help both connect with new and current customers as they discover buttons and other clickable facets with ease. Through this, you will be able to enhance the user experience for your visitors and realize higher conversion rates. You could also make our website mobile-friendly.
9. Gives You an Edge Over Your Competitors
If you want to out beat your competitors and attract more customers, you must go through your website design a couple of times and make sure that yours is better than theirs. Identify things that will set your business apart in the main areas and by being a class apart from the rest, you will be able to show potential customers why your products or services are better than the competition.
10. Enhance Customer Service and Satisfaction
Your audience can get a better understanding of how you treat your customers by just double-checking into your website. If you don’t invest in the design of your page, your target audience will eventually assume that you don’t aim to deliver value for their money. Make your business look transparent and welcoming by investing in a bright, eye-catching website design and always up to date. Most importantly, ensure it has easy yet efficient navigation that can give your audience a worthwhile experience every time they visit.
Your website design can greatly mean the difference between your business’ success and overall failure. It influences how your audience can on whole judge your business and the brand. Thus, ensuring your website design is aesthetically appealing, and highly user-friendly, as well as mobile-friendly, can take your business a long way in resulting at better conversion rate, which results in more earnings and successful business.
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What is website design?
A Web design refers to the overall design of websites that are being displayed on the internet. It sums up the total user experience aspects of website development.
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What is the most important thing in web design?
A web designer works on creating aesthetics and upgrading the appearance of the website. along with the layout, and, in some cases, the content of a website as well. These are some of the most important aspects of web design.
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What makes an amazing website?
These are the aspects that make a website a success for the business:
Serves as the First Impression for the business
Build Trust and Brand Consistency
Enhances Usability
Easy and Effortless Navigation
Fosters Your SEO Strategy
Improves Website Loading Speed
Reduces Bounce Rates
Improves ConversionImproves Conversion
An advantage over the competition -
How much does it cost to build a website for a small business?
A website cost can range as per its maintenance and updates required. It will also consist of website requirements for SEO.
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Which platform should I choose to build the website?
Before comparing the top website builders, you should write down what you want to do with your website, what are your business goals and what features would you want to see on your website. Based on this, you can go ahead with any website builder like WordPress, Wix, Shopify etc.