Do you have a website for your business and you want to be sure it performs to peak capabilities? There is a lot of attention on the technical aspects making sure it is bug-free, user-friendly and loads quickly but what about the design? Design should never be an afterthought, rather it requires careful planning and execution. If you haven’t yet prioritised the design of your website, it’s time to change your thinking. Here’s a look at the impact of aesthetics on your WordPress site’s success, exploring why design matters.
It Sets the Tone for Professionalism
Branding is extremely important for businesses. You are essentially painting a picture for customers and building an image that will hold up over time. One thing that can negatively or positively affect branding is professionalism. Customers need to know your business is professional at all times, and a great-looking website can help do that.
If you’ve got a sleek and modern design that is user-friendly, it instantly creates an air of professionalism. It can even help to set your company apart in terms of authority, as a professional website spills over into all aspects.
A Great Way to Stay Competitive
Another way design matters is the impact it has on the competition. Depending on the industry your business resides in, the competition can be steep. It can be very hard to stand out in a crowded field, which means a business needs to find every angle possible. A professional design that captures the attention of visitors can give you a leg up.
A good exercise for business owners to do is to take a look at the competition’s sites. What are the pros and cons of their sites, do they closely resemble each other, and what unique features do they offer visitors? Now use that same critical eye with your website. Is your site different enough? Does it stand alone? Does it offer features that the others don’t? How does your site rank?
Website design doesn’t always get the credit it deserves in terms of helping a company stay competitive, but it’s highly effective in this regard.
A Clean Design Makes the Site More User-Friendly
Sometimes the issue isn’t that your website lacks in design, you may have gone too far in the other direction. A busy over-complicated design can drive visitors away from your site, as they find it too difficult to navigate. Pages shouldn’t be cluttered and overstuffed, it’s okay to embrace a little white space.
An attractive website design includes things like easy-to-read font, a variety of media (text, pictures, graphs, videos and so forth), colours that don’t take away from the design, and more. Included in this category is also how and where you display menus. Drop-down menus tend to be the cleanest option as it keeps all that clutter and text off the screen until a person purposely requests it.
Navigation and Links Can Be Prioritised
Aesthetics should also include navigation and links, allowing you to prioritise both. Links are one of the most effective SEO tools available, so they should be taken advantage of at any opportunity. When you’ve got a well-designed website, it should feature links in a natural way never just slotting them in.
And as for the navigation, as mentioned above, drop-down menus can be the greatest tool if you like a clean and minimal look. Don’t forget to also feature a search tool so that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for. The more content you include on your website, the more important a search tool becomes.
It Helps the Website Feel Unique
Did you know that embracing creativity and aesthetic design also means the website will turn out more unique looking? Sure, you can still work from a basic template but adding a few unique and special features is what will help the design to pop. And when something is unique, it is memorable – exactly the kind of atmosphere you want to create for visitors.
You want them to remember visiting your site and finding what they were looking for so that they will hopefully come back.
Better Display Information
If you’re relying on your website to display important information about your products, services and that particular industry, then aesthetics can help with messaging. The right design factors in the best way to display content. You want visitors to feel like they are gaining something from your site, they can learn from your site, and the right design makes that a reality.
It goes back to not over-stuffing pages, ensuring content feels natural and that it is displayed in an easy-to-read manner.
Everything Still Needs to Flow
Home designers understand that while each room can be its own thing, and have its design concept – as a whole, it still needs to flow. There needs to be a sense of connection throughout the house, which can be achieved in various ways. Website design is the same in that each page can feel unique but it needs to keep some common threads so that the site flows.
A great way to ensure flow is maintained is sticking to a particular layout, and colour palette, making sure the logo appears on each page, menus are always in the same location and so on. Having a “contact us” button on each page is also great in that it will be a uniform feature across the board helping with the flow, and it also means visitors never have to struggle to try and connect with the company.
Think about how much is displayed on the website. It can include contact information, E-commerce features, promotions, branding, community forums or boards, calls-to-action, landing pages, quizzes, graphs, blogs, and product photos etc. That is a whole lot of content to tie together in a natural way, which is why flow matters.
Never Shrug Off the Importance of Design
The key takeaway is to give website design the credit it deserves. Sure the website may be free of bugs and glitches, but if you haven’t taken care where the aesthetics are concerned, then it’s not going to have the impact you hoped for.
