The Importance of Good Web Design

The web underpins much of our modern world and creates the foundation for how we interact with businesses, buy stuff, and find information. A large part of this comes from the millions of websites that have been crafted to carry out various functions ranging from providing purely informational content that helps us solve those trivia-related arguments we sometimes find ourselves reneged in when with friends at the pub to more serious tasks like promoting a business or selling products. However, while millions of websites provide various services, you can generally separate them into one of two categories: well-designed and poorly designed. And for anyone who has ever had the misfortune of ending up on the latter, you will understand the frustration that can come from terrible UX and poor loading speeds.

This post aims to demonstrate how important good web design is when creating a new website and how it can affect everything from visitor retention to ensuring your business remains profitable.

Engage Users With Captivating Layouts

User engagement will be a common theme throughout this piece, for the very reason that engagement is what keeps people on your site for the longest and provides you with more opportunity to make a conversion of some description (sale, sign up, etc). This Buffalo web design company notes that every business is unique and has nuances that make it critical to portray the correct message as soon as someone lands on their site. By utilizing a layout that showcases your offerings in an accessible and relatable manner, you will draw in those who have landed on your site and hopefully retina them for longer.

When combined with a user experience that gently guides them throughout the website and toward an action you want them to take, you will be able to convert many more than if your layout was a confusing mess. The idea is to make life as simple as possible, not in a condescending way, but instead in acknowledgment that people have real lives, and if you can simplify them in any way possible, your efforts will be rewarded.

Outside of helping people to move around your site better, a well-thought-out layout can reduce clutter and speed up your site, which we will discuss in more detail later in the post.

The Right Typography Enhances Readability

Typography is an overlooked aspect of quality web design. Most lower-quality designers will tend to opt for some kind of sans-serif font and be done with it. However, just as with the marketing efforts of old, typography can have an enormous effect on the feel and overall readability of your website. There are some fonts that are ideally suited for specific industries, and you can see this when you visit law firm websites that will use a serif-style font in order to elicit a sense of trust and solidness.

Conversely, tech-oriented websites will opt for sans serif (usually Helvetica or Arial if the designer is having an "off day"), which brings up feelings of modernity and freshness. The font you select should be global, which is to say consistent throughout the website while being different for headings and paragraphs.

If you are designing your site by yourself, you can use any of the plethora of resources online to find out which fonts work well and complement each other so you will be assured that you end up selecting the perfect fonts. For best results, you should download the fonts you will use directly onto your site rather than pull them in from cloud archives like Google Fonts. This is because when you pull in the fonts from the web, your site has to perform additional actions to pull and then display them to your visitors, and these additional steps are known to slow down a site from loading as well as cause odd actions like popping in once the site has loaded.

All of these points can make a site look and feel less polished than it ought to be.

Less Fluff Means Faster Loading Times

As we have mentioned several times, site speed dramatically impacts how your site and entire brand are perceived. A slow website screams amateur and only serves to frustrate user experience and possibly turn them off wanting to browse. According to numerous studies, including those performed by company behemoths like Amazon, the relation between site speed and the likelihood of making a sale is proportional. This means that the longer a person has to wait for it to load, the less likely it will be that they will choose to wait around, thereby losing you a sale.

Moreover, we aren't merely talking about one or two seconds here or there, but rather milliseconds. Some studies have shown that just a 100-millisecond delay can lead to a 1% loss in sales. This fact might not be as pertinent to you as it might be to Amazon, but the fact remains that the slower your site is, the more likely it will be that your visitors will cease to be visitors and move on to the next website in the search results.

A great website design should be able to cut away the bloat and fluff that far too many sites believe they need and serve up a beautiful but highly usable website that visitors enjoy using and serves its purpose. 

The Best Websites Are Multiformat

Web designers who only design sites that function perfectly for a large screen are stuck in the past and should be avoided like the plague. It may sound a little extreme, but if you ask yourself how you personally access most of the internet, chances are high you will say via your phone or tablet (but smartphone more often than not). It's not an excellent situation for website designers who have spent decades honing their craft for larger screens, but if you want to bring in the punters and move them forward towards making a sale, your website should be firmly rooted in a mobile-first design language. Fortunately, it shouldn't be out of the realm of the top web designers to generate a site that functions just as well in a variety of formats, as long as they make use of the various tools for doing so. 

UX Is Critical If You Want To Enhance The Experience

Understanding UX, or User Experience, is essential to improving web design. UX centers on how users interact with a website, focusing on the overall feel rather than just the appearance. An effective UX design ensures that using a website is smooth and enjoyable for visitors, hopefully allowing users to move through the site effortlessly, find information without hassle, and remain as engaged as possible so they will stick around for longer. By enhancing the overall user journey, quality UX design removes unnecessary barriers and simplifies the process of a range of actions, whether that be navigating through the menus or helping users find the product or service they desire with as few clicks as feasibly possible. 

Boosts Credibility

Visitors typically form their first impressions of a business after all of the elements have loaded, and they are presented with a website to make their decision. If there is one surefire way to turn a potential customer off from buying something, it's by presenting them with a site that looks and functions terribly. Aside from the fact that it just looks unprofessional, you run the risk of looking a little too scammy for anyone to want to drop any amount of money. Great design should speak to the demographic you are trying to reach and allow them to move throughout the site with ease and grace. Think about the last time you landed on a website that was poorly laid out and didn't pay any heed to even the most basic design fundamentals. Ask yourself how long you stayed on that site and if you were confident enough to spend money. If the answer is not long and unlikely to spend money, you are not alone. The worse a site looks (objectively speaking, of course), the lower the likelihood that anyone will take you seriously. Conversely, if you have ended up on a website that maintains consistent branding across its various online channels, you are very likely to want to continue using it and might even become a loyal customer over time. 

Aids In Search Engine Optimization

Although the SEO landscape is going through somewhat of an adjustment recently with a seemingly never-ending cycle of algorithm updates and the introduction of the dreaded AI (which has incidentally been showing signs of extreme hallucination), it remains the premier way to bring in lots and lots of highly targeted and valuable customers, potential or actual. Because high-quality, contemporary design emphasizes a more minimalist look and makes an effort to ensure it can be crawled and navigated by bots and people alike, you will find that the better your site operates, the higher you can rise in the coveted search results. While it's crucial to understand that there is much more to SEO than design alone, inducing hundreds of factors that directly influence how well you will rank, great design undoubtedly plays a role. Moreover, it can play an indirect role in helping you boost the ranking factors that can move the needle. For example, one of the most commonly understood ranking factors is acquiring relevant and high-quality backlinks. This has been proven time and time again to raise your site through the general flotsam and jetsam that make up most of the SERPs. 

Nevertheless, finding relevant links to point to your site may be easy enough, but the question is whether they're good enough to make a difference. In reality, the kinds of sites offering the cream of the crop will only want to point to websites that function like real sites and will absolutely avoid those that look like the owners had their nephew build it out using a WordPress template. In other words, the more credible your site looks, the higher the odds are that other websites are comfortable linking out to it.

Establishes Brand Identity

Establishing a coherent brand identity can make the difference between creating loyal customers and missing out on sales. A polished website reflects the values and professionalism of a business, instilling trust and confidence in visitors. By ensuring that your website has a consistent look and feel that aligns with your brand ethos, you set the stage for recognition across different platforms. Practical design elements such as a cohesive color palette, intuitive user interface, and high-quality visuals help create a memorable experience that resonates with your audience. These elements signal to potential customers that your brand is reliable and worth their attention. An attractive and functional website can also encourage visitors to spend more time exploring, increasing the likelihood of conversion. A strong brand identity helps differentiate your business from your peers, ensuring that customers can readily recall and prefer your brand over competitors. An attention to detail in your website design demonstrates a commitment to quality, which can extend to other brand interactions. When users consistently encounter a positive and uniform brand experience across digital channels, it fosters brand loyalty and trust, making a visually impressive and user-friendly website a cornerstone in building and maintaining a credible business.

Reduces Bounce Rates

Bounce rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page, and high bounce rates can be detrimental to your business, as they often imply that visitors are not finding what they are looking for or that the site is not engaging enough to retain their interest. This can lead to missed opportunities for conversions and negatively impact search engine rankings. Reducing bounce rates is primarily dependent on a well-designed website. Visitors are more likely to remain and explore additional pages if the interface is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. Improving user experience may be as simple as making your website load faster and easier to browse. In order to keep visitors engaged and reduce the possibility that they will leave your site too soon, you need to have engaging content, information that is well-organized, and buttons that direct them to take action.

It's clear just how vital high-quality website design can be for your business's continued success in many different ways. Perhaps the most important is that it can build credibility and help cement your brand as the place to be for whatever you might sell. Aside from this, the increased credibility you gain can indirectly boost your SEO and marketing efforts, causing an increase in visitors and more chances to boost revenue.