How To Keep Your Website From Ruining Your Company’s Reputation
Websites are one of the most important parts of owning a business, as it is a hub for customers to find more information about the business, granting easier access to contact capabilities, and can allow remote purchases for convenience. At its front, however, websites serve an essential purpose: as they commonly act as the first place a customer will look toward, it serves as a place to make an excellent first impression.
Web design is a core factor in determining how you appear to your customers through your website. No matter how qualified or excellent your products are, if your customers’ first experience with your business is through your website, it must look professional and pleasing to maintain your customers' credibility and trust.
The market is also ever-growing, and it’s almost certain that you will have some competitors. It is therefore also important to keep SEO in mind, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are the most used medium of internet browsing when looking for basic information, so make sure your website stands out from your competitors. Optimizing your website will mean you must do many things, such as making your content accessible to “robot crawlers” to find and add your content to the search engine database and other things associated with web design philosophy.
What is Web Design?
Web design refers to, as the name suggests, the design of a website or webpage on the internet, usually regarding the aesthetics and functions of said website. While the concept of web design is generally intertwined with web development, development focuses more on the software programming aspects of website creation, as opposed to the displayed elements and design philosophy. While a person can undertake both the development and design of a webpage or website, these tasks can also fall into different groups.
In designing a website, web designers are in charge of deciding the aesthetics and functions of a website. They can create the assets that a website will use or even build mockups of what a website should look like or how it should function, but they don’t usually write the code to make it happen. Web developers, as development refers to the programming and building of a website, are not usually concerned with how a website “should” look or behave but are the ones who code and create the website based on instructions from both the web designers and their clients.
Looking deeper into what design exactly means, even a single webpage has many different aspects of design that need to be considered. In terms of aesthetics, this includes (but may not be limited to) the font choice for other areas of text, the colors and imagery used throughout the page, and for the most aesthetically inclined, animations for different parts of the page (e.g., animating text or other elements when interacted with). The design also refers to the functionality of a website or looking into what a website should do and how it should behave. This means figuring out navigation (where interactive elements should direct the user), the speed and performance of a website, and taking into account SEO (Search Engine Optimization, which is explained in more detail later).
When looking into the creation of your website, the obvious first step is to look for web developers who can use HTML and CSS to build the website from the ground up. However, the importance of a web designer and web design should be noticed, lest your website lose its purpose and value. Looking deeper into the different web design aspects shows their purposes.
For aesthetics, it should be easy to understand why they are important to consider — a better-looking website attracts more customers and keeps them engaged. An exceptionally well-designed website can even leave a lasting impression on those who visit and use it. Functionality-wise, well-thought-out navigation will also keep customers using your website, as attempting to interact with a business only for the website to be confusing to use and navigate will end up irritating and have those potential customers looking elsewhere. Similarly, optimizing your website for quick loading times also improves the user experience, and, more noticeably, a slow website is very frustrating to use.
One of the most important aspects of a website is its readability, which uses both aspects of aesthetics and functionality. A readable website has good font choice, text structuring, and color contrast to ensure the content is as clear and easy as possible.
What options are there for Web Design?
Hiring web developers and designers isn’t the only option you have when it comes to creating and designing a website. Realistically, there is one other option: using a website builder. This includes GoDaddy, Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, and many more options. Choosing whether to use these website builders or hire web developers and designers depends on what you need, and they both have distinct benefits and drawbacks.
Website builders are much cheaper than hiring web development and web design teams. Many options for website building allow you to build a website for free or at least give you a few tools to show you what it is capable of. Buying access to a premium website builder with more development and design tools doesn’t bite too hard into your budget.
However, Website builders have many disadvantages compared to a web development and designing team. For one, while website builders offer many tools to build, design and customize your website, they don’t give you complete creative freedom, at least in comparison to building a website from the ground up using HTML and CSS. Having a competent web developer and designer allows many more possibilities for your website creation. In addition, hiring a team to develop and design your website is also much more convenient on your end, as you will only need to give your general ideas, wants, and opinions to your team without doing all of the heavy lifting.
Web Design Isn’t Easy
Web design is integral to an online presence but comes with challenges. A few problems with improving web design can be found by looking at the different aspects of web design. Looking at website functionality and aesthetics, improving these aspects without caution can compromise your website's speed. Another thing to look out for is compatibility with other devices. Unless specifically creating a mobile-friendly version of your website, elements such as interactive element animations, structure, and graphics, while perfectly suitable for desktop users, may be downright unreadable on mobile devices.
Search Engine Optimization: Boosting your website outside of your website
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Taking into account Search Engine Optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is one of the most essential parts of web design philosophy. SEO means optimizing your website to make it more visible on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) to increase the chance of someone visiting it first. To better understand how to optimize a website, it is essential to know how search engines work in the first place.
Search engines are systems that locate and index various types of content from the internet. They have three primary functions to provide the user with the best results for their queries: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Crawling refers to the process in which search engines send out “crawlers,” essentially digital robots, to scour the internet for new/updated content, ranging from websites and webpages to more minor things such as images and PDF files. This content is then taken into an “index,” a database that stores the content found by the search engine’s crawlers. The content in these indexes is then “ranked” by its relevance to the search query input from the user.
Why should we care about SEO?
The reason that SEO is so important is that a majority of the traffic your website receives is through search engines. If someone wants to know more about a particular good or service, an internet search is one of the easiest ways to find out more about it. 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search or search results that aren’t included due to paid advertising. With this, you would naturally want your website to be one of the first results to pop up on the first page of the search results. Unless someone is looking for something specific, your business being one of the first options available on the search results page, will bring in a large amount of traffic to your website and increase the number of people interacting with your business.
How do I improve my website’s SEO?
Improving SEO is more complex than improving other aspects of web design. There aren’t straightforward and apparent changes you can make, and there are even a few things outside your website domain that you can use to improve your website’s SEO. A helpful way to start is to look at Mozlow’s Hierarchy of SEO Needs, a graph affectionately referencing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The website must be accessible to search engine crawlers even to be considered for appearing on the search results page. The crawlers will need to be able to read the website to gauge what the content is, organize it into the index, and only pull it up when a related search query is requested.
Next up is making sure that the content on your website is appropriate for the types of search queries you want to be leading to your website. For example, suppose your business is a produce distributor (i.e., an online grocery store). In that case, you want the content on your website to reflect such to draw attention from search engine crawlers and have your website categorized for fruit, vegetable, and shopping queries. Keywords are also important when considering how users will navigate your website. Knowing what people are looking for and finding trends in recent search results can help you optimize your website’s content to accommodate these trends and make your website more widespread across more search results and higher ranking than other results.
Making sure your website is efficient and optimized for speed and having user-friendly UI and accessibility keeps customers on your website and improves your ranking for search engines. Google has a method of determining how well-optimized a page is, called Core Web Vitals. Enhancing your website for this metric will also improve your ranking on Google, which is currently, by far, the most popular search engine.
What methods do I have for improving SEO?
With all of the information given, improving SEO can be a monumental task. Even if you aren’t well-versed in improving SEO, working on your website and performing basic SEO can help your website. There are a few ways you can go about this, including looking at the previous sections to improve the content on your website. You can also look for services on the internet to check your websites. Many SEO resources provide a checkup on your website and gauge SEO.
As with almost any task, there are digital marketers you can call out for who will dig into your website’s content and inner workings to have your website outperform the competition. Web designers can also provide SEO services without looking for a separate person/team to handle it, but the quality of their SEO may not be as solid.
