The Importance of A Good Design

Your business website is the hub of your online brand. It is the virtual representation of your company whether your company is brick-and-mortar or not. When you are doing business online, people can’t see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with a brick-and-mortar business. Hence, people do judge a book by its cover. In other words, your online presentation is very important. This is where good design comes into play.

Imagine if you are running a business offline. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in raggedy or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? When your staff wears professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. We’ve all heard the saying “first impressions matter.”

That saying applies to your website as well. If your website is put together in a half-assed way and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are telling your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the flipside, if you have a totally professional-looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. It shows them that you are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company professionally designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit counts. This matters because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. There shouldn’t be anything in your business that looks sloppy and low quality. Whether it’s the presentation of your online business and/or offline business, you should be striving for excellence!

Improve Usability of Your Website

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site will ultimately be useless. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions in the best way possible.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to make sure that the lines are spaced out accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be.

Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough for people to easily read. Some websites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may appear to have a neat and tidy look, you would have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find the content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without any hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have. Providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast. Site load time is extremely important! One way to mess up and lose visitors is if your website has a slow loading time. If you do not want to lose visitors, make sure that your site loads up fast. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds or less, so make sure the crËme de la crËme of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last but not least, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

In Conclusion, Websites With Good Design And Usability Retains Visitors

It’s really that simple. In a hyper-competitive online economy where businesses are popping up with websites, retaining visitors is a must. You can’t afford for a visitor to go on your business website and get frustrated from a slow load time. A bad design that makes navigating the website an issue can be frustrating as well. If you have a small business or startup, working with a professional web designer is of paramount importance. Visitors are always potential customers. They are potential clients who might do business with us when our website at its best. There are many other factors at play, but good design and usability are factors that are at the top of the list.