Why is website design so essential?

A well planned website ought to be easy to navigate since this is one of the things that will cost you customers faster than anything else. People expect to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, if they can't they will just go to another site. It is easier for them to visit another site to find what they are looking for than to spend time searching yours. This is one of the reasons that you have to have a well designed site, it is simply too easy for people to go somewhere else to find what they are looking for if you make it difficult for them.

It is important to keep in mind that your website also has to be well designed in order to get your visitors to do what you want them to do. When you build a website it is usually for a reason, it may to make sales directly or it may be to have people sign up for your mailing list or just to provide them with information. Whatever it is you are trying to accomplish your site has to be designed with this in mind. There is little value to getting lots of visitors to your site if they are not doing what you need them to do.

One thing to consider when you are designing your website is that it is one of the most visible aspects of your company. In large part it will affect the way people view your business. This is something that a lot of companies forget when they are designing a website. They focus on using the site for sales, which is fine to a point but you have to remember that there is more to it than that. Your site has to show your company in a good light or it is going to do you more harm than good.

Endeavor an easy experiment:

Think of something you need more information on, search for it in Google and click on a link that looks like it will have the answers for you. On that website, how long does it take you to find the information you’re looking for?  Is it quick and easy or is it difficult?  Is it obvious how to navigate the site and move from section to section?

If you can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily, it means the website has been designed well, with usability in mind. And usability is made of a sum of characteristics which make the navigation of the users really easy to handle when they enter a website, as we will discuss further on.

The design of a website is important because it affects how quickly visitors can find what they are looking for.  If it is difficult or frustrating, the visitor will leave and try on another site - and that is a lost opportunity.  A good design will be easy to understand and navigate, helping potential customers find what they need and taking you one step closer to making a sale or getting in touch.

If you feel that your design isn’t quite what it should be, think about the following aspects to see how your website can be improved:

Aesthetics:

One article is clear: a website has to look good.  But it’s extremely important to keep usability in mind and not sacrifice it just for the sake of appearance.  The design should lead the eye from what’s most important to secondary items; this can be done with space and typography.  Images and colors can be used for calls to action.  And a professional, modern look can immediately build trust. The possibilities are endless but a good design will create trust and guide visitors to take action.

Association:

Just like your house, everything in a website needs to have a logical place, helping site visitors easily find what they are looking for. The site navigation needs to be in a logical and consistent place on every single page.  It should be apparent what the main content on a page is and what is secondary, based on size and location.  Everything on a page needs to have a purpose.  We have seconds to make an impression and if the organization doesn’t make sense, the visitor will leave.

An illustration flash:

You need to have a spark on your website that appeals to people, something that catches their eye. The internet is a visual medium and it’s important to use images or video without overdoing it. Possibilities include slideshows, photo galleries and and YouTube videos (which also appear in search results as part of YouTube.com).

Putting it all collectively:

A website’s design will make the site visitor decide whether to stay and take action or leave - it’s as simple as that.  It will need to create trust, make sense and allow people to find what they need quickly and easily - while doing what you want them to do.

Of course, there’s more to a website than looks - like coding standards and cross-platform compatibility - but those are things that site visitors don’t see that a web developer like me takes care of.

Chew on these ideas and take a few minutes to review your website and consider if its design is doing what you need it to do.

What is responsive design?

A responsive design simply means a website that has been constructed so that all of the content, images and structure of the site remain the same on any device. For example, when a user accesses a site on their desktop, they are getting the full view of the site. But when that same user goes to visit the site from their Smartphone or tablet.

In other words, with a responsive website design, you don't have to have worry about having different websites for various devices or making sure that your site runs properly on a mobile device.

But there are some other really important reasons why you should make the switch to responsive design for your website.

Mobile phone tradition is growing:

Take a step into the outside world and you'll definitely notice a lot of people on their mobile phones. In fact, it seems that just about everyone is attached at the hip with their Smartphone. For some reason, however, there are many businesses that have not yet picked up on this trend. More than 20 percent of Google searches are now being performed on some sort of mobile device.

v  In 2012 over half of all local searches were done on a mobile device.

v  25 percent of Internet users only access the internet via a mobile device in the United States.

v  25.85 percent of all emails are opened on mobile phones, with another 10.16 percent being opened on tablets.

v  In 2014 mobile Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop usage.

v  Out of the 4 billion mobile phones in the world, 1.08 billion are Smartphone and 3.05 are SMS enabled.

Suggested By Google:

We all know that Google is a really big deal. In fact, the Big G claimed 67 percent search market share in 2013, making it the most popular search engine in the world. So, if Google claims that it prefers responsive web design as the recommended mobile configuration.

But why does Google prefer responsive design? For starters, it's more efficient for Google to bot crawl the site and then index and organizes all the content that is online. The reason for this is that with responsive design, all sites have just one URL and the same HTML across all devices. When a business has both a mobile site and desktop site, there will be a different URL and different HTML for each. This forces Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same exact site.

Also, when there is just one website and URL, it's much easier for users to share, engage and interact with the content on that site as compared to a site that has different pages for mobile and desktop users. Google is a fan of that as well. Why? Because what if someone shared a mobile site on a social media outlet and one of their connections viewed that mobile site on their desktop? That viewer would then be viewing a less than optimal site because it was intended for mobile. This makes the user unhappy.

And Google realizes that unhappy people will go elsewhere, meaning that bounce rates increase and the site will not rank on mobile searches. This creates a whole big headache involving Google's external link algorithm and on-page errors.