Strategic Website Design
Web design is an important and key part of a website, and of digital marketing as a whole. Well designed websites reflect the brand image and encourages users to convert, amongst other things. Website design is a crucial part of a website that needs attention if you want to succeed online.
Four Aspects
Brand Image
Conversion
Functionality
SEO
BRAND IMAGE
Customers recognize the brand
Branding is very important, especially as a company/business grows. Your brand image isn’t just the logo and the colour scheme, it’s everything from the ongoing design traits, such as headings always being in bold text all capitalised, through to use of images and layouts.
Customers start expecting design and layout, meaning that they can instantly recognise the brand and therefore the company.
A web designer should understand the branding of a company. They should use this understanding to design the site to be seamless from this existing branding. They can do that by using some of those strategies just mentioned. Things like keeping spacing accurate, text consistent throughout and of course, using the correct colour scheme for example.
CONVERSION
Customer journey to buy product
Conversions are when someone on your website reaches a point that you want them to reach. This point, known as the conversion point, is the goal.
For most non-commerce websites, this will typically be a contact form. E-commerce websites have it slightly easier, their conversion point is typically the sale of a product or service.
Website design can help direct users on a journey to a conversion point. Of course, this journey’s ending is the conversion point. Intelligent design can help improve the numbers of conversions by keeping these uses on the journey and pointing them in the right direction.
FUNCTIONALITY
Easy to navigate for required things
Web designers should have a good understanding of how a website works and the functionality of it.
By knowing this, they can design elements that are achievable by a website developer. They can also design more functionality into a website, something that a website developer might have missed for example. This can increase the user-ability of a website.
Website designers using functionality ideas can increase how much time a user stays on a website. By keeping a user on a website for longer, they’re statistically more likely to convert into a sale or lead.
SEO
Search engine ranking
Many people don’t consider SEO as an aspect of website design, however, a well-designed website can help improve search engine rankings.
This is through the use of good page structures, imagery and general design. For example, a good page structure that has good links throughout can move a user and a crawl bot through a website efficiently. Imagery, that isn’t too heavy and is good looking can help image rankings. Finally, well-designed website pages that aren’t too heavy and don’t require too much in order to load them, means the page speeds can be faster. Let’s not forget about mobile phones, highly mobile optimised websites will always rank better than none optimised sites.
The purpose of website design and SEO is that it can help design a site towards search engine friendliness. A mobile designed site that is more user-friendly will have buttons of a certain size, with spacing correct and keep that consistent theme throughout, even on smaller devices.
Recent Websites Developed
In Summary
We need to clear up something. Website design and website development are actually different things. Although in many cases if you’re offered web design, they’ll typically also develop. Website design is the process of designing a website. Whereas website development is around the building and functionality of the site. A web dev (developer), might design something, but typically their role is to build the site to the web designers designs. Ensuring the design of the finished website is exactly what the designer specified in the original design.
Website design is not as simple as developing a layout and colour scheme for a website. The purpose, and therefore why it is so important, is that it can help in every aspect of the site. From how users move through it, to spreading brand image, improving user-ability and through to help promote the website.
I am an expert in both the design and development of websites. Let’s get in touch to display your business in the online world in the best possible way.