It’s never been more important to have a website that does justice to your brand.
After all, this is how you present yourself to the world. Your website is the portal through which the whole world meets you, and website development and design are the tools that help you build that portal. Website design and development are two sides of the same coin. One always informs the other, and together, they are the best instruments at your disposal to create a website that you can be proud of.
Here are a few things that your website can do for you when you rely on great website design and development.
Showcase Your Brand
There’s a saying out there that resonates when it comes to showcasing your brand online: “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
It’s not good enough for your brand to talk about what your products or services can do for people. In this day and age, that can ring hollow. But if you can showcase your values via your website, then it has a ring of authenticity to it. People need to see, feel and hear that you are what you say you are. That’s the most powerful way to authentically showcase your brand.
There’s no mystery around it; it’s just human nature. Design that looks modern and professional encourages trust in an audience, while a poorly designed, messy website confuses the viewer and makes them doubt your legitimacy. Chances are, they will save their money and spend it on a website that looks more trustworthy to them.
Another vital need that good website design fulfills is brand consistency. Delivering a recognizable and familiar style to an audience — where they connect with your logo, color palette, font or design choices — creates a relaxed and reassuring online space that tells them they can get what they need from your site.
Great website design delivers a consistent visual language that people instinctively respond to and enjoy using. That can only be good for your brand.
Stay Independent & Adaptable
Each word, image and link on a web page has a role to play in serving the user and telling your story. Use design to lend credibility to your claims. Most web users today are sophisticated, and they can tell when what you’re offering is nothing more than marketing schtick. At the end of the day, you have to mean what you’re saying online — it’s the only way people are going to trust you.
And a lack of trust is the kiss of death for a website.
It’s the easiest thing in the world for users to keep scrolling or to just click away from a website and go somewhere else. When that happens, you’re dead in the water. Once they go, they aren’t coming back!
Good website design and development don’t have to be new and sophisticated. They just have to showcase who you are and what you do. It’s not rocket science — at a fundamental level, website design guides the eye of the user and takes them on a journey. Without strong website development and design, they’re likely to get lost.
Provide an Amazing Customer Experience
In a recent Japanese usability study, two researchers placed identical ATMs in a public space and encouraged people to use them. One ATM was aesthetically well designed, the other was not. Even though they were identical machines in terms of functionality, the users reported that the aesthetically pleasing machine actually worked better than the other one.
As one article puts it, “Good web design impacts both usability and our perception of usability too.”
Providing a great customer experience comes down to giving people what they want from your website. You can use design to do this by making it easy for them to find the services they’re looking for. Simple navigation options, clear choices and a logical path to purchase — these all fall under the banner of website navigation, which is a key part of website design and development.
You can provide an amazing customer experience not only through what you offer but also in the way you offer it. Through the use of elements like color, size and shape, as well as white space, your design builds an overall impression of your brand that should fit your industry and the audience that you’re serving.
Design that’s in step with the aesthetic of its intended audience is a powerful combination that leads naturally to amazing customer experiences.
Stay Modern
Keeping your website design looking fresh and modern is difficult. Everything new becomes old, and there is always something more recent to consider. For that reason, many web designers use classic design principles that never age and opt for a timeless, classic look for a site.
It’s difficult to do well, but that’s why great website design is so powerful. If it were easy, everyone would have a beautiful, modern website. And we all know that’s just not the case.
What is modern today? It’s bold and simple. It’s not afraid to mix up layouts and use graphics and animation to tell a story. It puts mobile layout front and center in any design choices and obsesses about getting the customer from A to B as easily as possible.
Being modern is tricky and, at the same time, inevitable. As Salvador Dali once wrote “Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
Improve SEO & Grow Your Web Traffic
Today’s website designers must be able to understand the more technical aspects of creating a webpage. Each of the elements on the page must not only be pleasant to look at, but they must also work in terms of search engine optimization (SEO).
That means ensuring that your design is backed up by solid coding that makes it easy for search engines like Google and others to find your content and deliver it to the audience.
How do you do that?
- Use relevant keywords that users type into search engines.
- Add title tags and meta descriptions to your web pages.
- Make sure each page is unique.
- Give images ALT tags.
- Make sure Google Analytics is added to every page and delivers useful results.
The list is long and requires dedication and long hours. But, in the end, it all adds up and proves to Google that your page deserves to rank highly in its search results.
Growing web traffic may not feel like it’s the responsibility of a website developer. In reality, though, there are many ways the design of a page contributes to how well a website can deliver to its customers. Faster loading times as a result of minimal design and clever, simple navigation are just two tools that search engines look for. Improving them for your site will inevitably lead to higher traffic.
Boost Your Return on Investment
The last thing that you need is a good-looking website that cost a lot of money but doesn’t contribute to the bottom line. Website development and design need to pay particular attention to the customer journey and make sure that your customer pipeline drives toward the checkout — or toward whatever action you want them to take.
Try to visualize a visitor’s experience when engaging with your brand from start to finish. You need to know what happens when they first hear about your brand, where that initial contact takes them, and how to prompt them to take the first step and then the next until they reach the designated endpoint.
Plotting that journey and delivering a great pathway to get there is a key part of successful website development.
Looking to Invest in Custom Website Design and Development?
Do these ideas about website design strike a chord with you? If so, then Orpheus may just be the website development team you’ve been looking for. We are passionate about design with a purpose — the kind that works for our clients and justifies the time and investment that they put into it.
We don’t want to dictate what you do. We want to work with you to come up with web pages that work and that you can be proud of. We craft captivating, responsive and interactive websites that tell your story. Take a look at our website design portfolio to get a sense of what Orpheus can do for you.
Design is nothing more than a dream without the website development that makes it happen. Every great website requires people who can turn vision into reality, and we do this by building stable, scalable web applications for businesses that want to provide a compelling brand experience for their customers. Find out more about the custom WordPress plug-ins, standalone web applications and third-party software integrations that bring our websites to life.
Ready to re-imagine your website? Reach out today, and let’s get started!
