The Importance of Good Web Design
A website is an online identity of a company or of an individual involved in Internet Marketing. The task associated with the website is to represent a company, sell a company's name, attract more visitors, generate more business leads, promote more sales of a company's product and services, and ultimately, help to gain more return on investment.
In this era of advanced technology, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has highly dominated the marketing practice, and due to the easy availability and affordability on the internet, people are running after it and making huge profits in the comfort of their own home.
Have you, at one point or another, ever thought about designing your own web site? If so, what do you think is the most important aspect of this task?
A study by researchers at Carleton University on Ottawa show that first impressions count in website design. They showed that people form opinions about the look of your website in 1/20th of a second. The aesthetic of your design is thus an important factor in the success of your website and online business.
By no means will the aesthetic of your site be the only factor in your site’s success or lack of success. It is one factor among many, but given the increasing competition for the internet Rand, it only makes sense to have as much of a competitive advantage as you can.
Simple websites generally fail to have the desired impact on customers. A website with some graphics is a must, along with well organized, informative and relevant information. It's important to get the balance right here, because too much copy will bore your users, while too many graphics will slow your site down and cause users to get frustrated. Insufficient copy can also be detrimental, as search engines don't view that page as useful, meaning your search ranking will be lower. A well designed website will also attract customers to your products or services.
If you really want to boost your sales you must have an attractive and functional website.
For a website to be successful it is absolutely essential to understand what your customer's wants and needs are and how these can be met in your design.
As a serious online business person, what is important for your business is to prepare a website that is well designed, attractive, and easy to navigate.
Ensure that it is highly usable and full of relevant content.
Any business owner would agree that a strong internet presence plays an important role in attracting the visitors and keeping them interested. You will be amazed to know that the right kind of web design can help you attract at least 30% more business and leads as compared to an average web design.
Since a website is made of several dynamic elements, you need to understand the impact each element has on your web design, and your visitors, in order to understand the importance of the role web design has in enhancing your
business growth.
* Colours and symmetry: The colours and shapes you use on your website create the first viewers impression. You can get tons of visits to your site, but dull colours and bad symmetry can nullify all the efforts you put into optimizing your site and driving visitors to it.
* Logos and brands: You want visitors to remember you easily and the logos or branding material can make a huge impact. The way to present them, however, is an art – you cannot have anything placed anywhere. Professional web designers look through user preferences and can help you determine the positioning of each element on your website.
* Call to action: Once a visitor comes to your site, there is a point when his/her interest peaks and this is the time for the call to action button to appear. Many online business owners have websites that fail in this
aspect and hence they lose out on nearly 20% of prospective leads. You need to know where to place the call to action buttons or contact details so that you do not lose out on opportunities.
* Content and Images: Most users browse the web day in and day out. They have specific ideas about how content and images should be placed on a website. If your site takes too long to load because of too many images or images that are too large, people are likely to click the back button and look for another site than wait for yours to load. Images and banners should be used sparingly and only to compliment your targeted content, 70% writing (content), 30% pictures (images) is a good rule to follow. Ideally, your homepage or index page should have your main content and the point of your website.
* Accessibility: You want to make your site easily accessible. All the information the visitor is looking for should be clearly marked with links that draw them in. In this way, hopefully, they will come back to your site in future.
A good web design is about getting all of the above elements together in a way that it looks attractive and also serves the business purposes. Your website should be easy to navigate with clear headers and title so that the
user can be hooked on and you can generate great business online with a good web presence.
Your overall site needs to be attractive, but not that much of a distraction that puts your readers off, clear, readable and easily viewable articles and valued content are what should be presented here. You need to think beyond
the fact that a particular design may look good to you, but may be off-putting to others.
Professional vs Amateur Web Design
By ‘professional’ I don’t necessarily mean you need to pay a professional to design your site, though as a web designer I do think it’s a good idea.
Professional designers have been trained to be able to control very subtle parts of a design that will often have a rather large impact. We’ve all seen examples of amateur designs that make you wonder who thought showing that site to the public was a good idea. These sites are often cluttered to the point that you can’t distinguish one element of the page from the other.
The point I started with and have hopefully maintained throughout is that design is very important to the success of a website. Again, it’s not the only factor and there are many successful sites suffering from poor design.
And while the cost of hiring a web professional to design your website might seem prohibitive at first, it’s not nearly as great a cost as not having a quality design.
Remember, that by making your site interactive and with something for the viewer to do, you may gain an advantage over other sites that don’t offer this.
What is HTML?
It’s a really good idea to get a basic understanding of HTML. The definition of HTML is HyperText Markup Language.
* HyperText is the method by which you move around on the web — by clicking on special text called hyperlinks which bring you to the next page. The fact that it is hyper just means it is not linear — i.e. you can go to any place on the Internet whenever you want by clicking on links — there is no set order to do things in.
* Markup is what HTML tags do to the text inside them. They mark it as a certain type of text (italicised text, for example).
* HTML is a Language, as it has code-words and syntax like any other language.
All websites are partly made up of and designed, by using HTML. It is not necessary to be a complete know-it-all in HTML, but it’s helpful to know the basics such as creating hyperlinks and links to images etc.
The internet has successfully united millions of people on one single platform. Today most people look for a company website when they want to buy something. Let your company's website be the one that is hit on simply because it provides complete and relevant information about your products or services, which meets your current and potential customers' needs.