Today, creating and maintaining a professional website is a business imperative for organizations across all industries. User engagement is increasingly turning digital, with the Internet becoming the preferred platform for all interactions. It’s quite likely that customers’ first acquaintance with your company is over your online presence. Your site should engage with visitors the way a friendly, helpful representative does, inspiring them to trust you. It should offer a delightful, memorable experience, reassuring users that their time is truly well spent.
Customers visiting your website expect much more than an unimaginative list of products and services. User expectations have changed, and business leaders must keep reinventing to keep their organizations ahead. This means your designs must evolve to sport a contemporary look while staying relevant, attractive, and useful for the visitor.
Whether you’re a large enterprise or a fledgling startup, a sound internet marketing strategy must be at the top of your priority list. In this article, we’ll discuss why web design matters. Let’s also understand how leading UI/UX design companies address the requirements and the key factors that constitute successful sites.
Why is web design important?
Visual impressions are critical. A Stanford University research study indicates that 75% of visitors assess a company’s credibility by its website. More importantly, 38% of users may shun businesses that don’t have an impressive web presence. Unless the site appeals to the visitor, they lose their interest, and you, their business. And they may never give you a second chance.
Consider this analogy: your website is, in many ways, a virtual office, but in a digital realm. When people visit your office in person, what do they see? Is the ambiance friendly or unsettling? Does it reinforce your corporate image? Do visitors feel lost? How courteous is the receptionist? Are there enthusiastic executives eager to help? How quickly are customers served? As they leave your office, do they feel satisfied? And, the most important question of them all, did the visit result in a sale?
UI/UX design studios assimilate such concerns in their projects to create rewarding user experiences. A competently crafted website serves as a remarkably efficient marketing platform, multiplying the organization’s sales prospects, growth, and profitability. Complementing your customer outreach programs with a robust web strategy helps you achieve several business objectives at once:
- The Trust Factor: A professional-looking website establishes your organization as a trustworthy entity. The right blend of persuasive copy and elegant imagery makes the content credible and relatable. Users are also inclined to visit pages ranked higher in search results, and the trust quotient gets a further boost when SEO techniques are leveraged.
- Brand Identity: With an intelligent placement of elements that characterize your company, you can enhance the brand recall value and grow customer mindshare. The approach may be direct, such as a prominent placement of the logo and the use of colors, or it may be subtler with the content or style tweaked to reinforce the message.
- Customer Experience: When your website captivates users, it inspires them to sustain the relationship. Better usability translates into enduring customer engagement. Users delighted with the experience bring in direct and indirect business opportunities to fuel your company’s growth plans. Your site must offer intuitive navigation and mobile-optimized layouts to suit varied customer needs.
- Leads and Conversions: The key goal of a corporate website is to enhance the organization’s business prospects. By reaching out to prospective customers, the site can play the role of a super-efficient salesperson, showcasing your products and services, engaging with users, kindling their interests, and responding to their queries. Your website is the key to generating and converting opportunities in the Internet era.
- Competition: In a crowded market, your business needs to make the right move to stay in the limelight. A website is a powerful medium that can add to your competitive edge. When users evaluate options, the deciding factor could be the impression your site creates. Does your website adequately reflect your capabilities and strengths? Will it score against a competitor’s site?
The world wide web is expanding at breakneck speed. Countless UI/UX design agencies churn out websites by the dozen –by the time you read this article, thousands of new sites would have gone live. When you create a website, it’ll join the millions already out there vying for users’ attention. How do you ensure your design checks all the right boxes? What can you do to make it impactful?
Another aspect compounds the issue: web design — or any creative work –is undoubtedly subjective. What looks good to you may not sway your colleague, and what you two agree upon may not enthuse your boss. Is it possible at all to create something that wins over everyone on the planet?
Fortunately, a few universal ideas work. With them, you can improve the user experience while avoiding the pitfalls that can ruin your site and, in turn, your company’s reputation. These sure-fire approaches are part of the “best-practice” guides followed by top-notch UI/UX design studios. Leverage them to enhance the value of your site:
- Balance: According to Google Research, 50 milliseconds – that’s five-hundredths of a second – is the time people take to form an opinion about your site. There’s no way they can read the content or notice the images within that period. What can possibly strike the user’s eye and mind in that fleeting moment? It’s the visual quality – or how pleasant it looks in grossly simplified terms. The site should be inviting, with an esthetically perfect balance between the text and graphical elements. Too much copy turns people off, however lovingly written it may be. Graphics-heavy pages may look jarring and even slow down the site, forcing visitors to go elsewhere. The copy, images, and white space must be harmonized to offer a delightful viewing experience — one that can be felt in a split second.
- Consistency: Does your website’s appearance align with the corporate stature? A few unique attributes, which you might have carefully cultivated over the years, help customers recognize your organization and what it represents. The website should reemphasize these characteristics. Sticking to the company’s typographical styles and color palettes is essential. The page structures and the juxtaposition of the elements need to be in resonance with the brand identity, besides being uniform across the site. The content’s tone and presentation must follow company-wide communication guidelines.
- Creativity: Design ideas continue to evolve, and customer preferences change quickly. Yet, UI/UX design agencies must strive to keep the pages compellingly attractive. Take the time to evaluate if the website is modern and distinctive enough. Do the visual components offer a refreshing experience to users? Graphs, illustrations, animation, and infographics add variety and clarity – but do stock images and hackneyed representations of ideas dilute the message? Are they relevant and relatable to the context? Let your designs enthrall and inspire visitors with their individuality.
- User-friendliness: Remember — you build a site not for yourself but for your customers. The easier the navigation, the more popular the site will get. A logical organization of the content into pages is the first step. A well-thought-out sitemap ensures a streamlined flow of information. This is to be supplemented with coherent page titles and cross-linking, which ensure visitors can quickly and effortlessly find what interests them. According to a study, more than 55% of internet usage is on mobiles. Thus, the need to optimize the design for smartphones cannot be overstated.
- Copy: Readability is key. Users that come to your site are keen to find information, and you must delight them with lucid and concise content. Whether you intend to describe the technical specifications of a product, the superiority of your services, or the accomplishments of your leadership team, the language must strike a chord with the reader without sounding haughty or distant. Find the ideal text length and tone that’ll work for each page and topic. Proofreading is a must to eliminate typos and grammatical errors; the language must be direct, simple, and free of cliches. It’s also critical to check for plagiarism – sometimes, it’s unintended due to the use of a regular, common phrase.
- CTAs: The basic premise of an internet site is to promote a company and its products. Websites must go beyond being simple repositories of information; they must facilitate the conversion of customers’ interest into revenue streams. This is best achieved by Call-to-Action buttons that gently nudge the user to affirm their interest. Three attributes enhance CTA efficacy: persuasive text that sparks the visitor’s curiosity, colors and shapes that catch their eye, and intelligent positioning that maximizes the probability of clicks. To comply with privacy concerns, indicate how you use the customer’s data (if you collect any). User experience improves when you acknowledge the action, telling visitors what to expect next.
- Performance: Speed matters. The average visitor wants instant responses from the site. According to a Google report published in 2018, the bounce rate, which is a measure of how many people abandon their visit, exponentially increases with load time; the probability of a bounce more than doubles if the page takes more than 5 seconds. A slow site neutralizes every other measure you’ve taken to improve the user experience. To tackle this, choose a web server or hosting service that offers the required system resources. Employ compression wherever possible. Apply performance-optimized templates and plugins, and eliminate inefficient or unnecessary code.
Looking for web design ideas that deliver? Talk to us. Ambian Studio is among the top UI/UX design companies in India. Our team is driven by a passion for excellence. We love building new-age user experience strategies for businesses keen to benefit from futuristic thinking. With our customer-focused approach, agility, and positive attitude, we fulfill the exacting needs of global organizations. Our services span the entire UX spectrum, addressing the unique challenges and expectations of startups, mid-size companies, and enterprises.
