Why Professional Web Design is Important
To succeed online your website needs to:
- Project a professional image.
- Be easy to use.
- Be attractive, enticing and enjoyable to use.
- Convey your key messages powerfully.
- Be search engine friendly (search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, reward well-designed and optimised websites with high page listings. This can make your website instantly visible on the Internet, and lead to increased business).
- Be accessible to people with disabilities
- Offer 100 per cent secure transactions (if it is an e-commerce site - a 'webshop').
- Be legal in the UK in terms of accessibility and usability.
And:
- Get visitors to buy your products or services if it is a commercial site, or act on the included information across your pages if it is an informational/brochure
website.
Why You Should Always Avoid the 'Cheap' Web Design Option
In the old days when web design was in its infancy, anyone could design and code a website. But web design has changed dramatically since then. As the Internet has evolved, web design has evolved in tandem.
Although ready-made Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash animated website templates offered cheaply by many IT consultancies, printing companies, etc. can seem like a kind of heaven-sent 'off the peg' answer to all your web design prayers, choosing this option could mean you are actually compromising your website, your chances of generating website traffic (visitors to your website), and also your business's reputation.
What Your Website Absolutely Must Include
Many companies offering web design (outside of their primary profession) simply don't understand how to design, code, and optimise websites to ensure they work for clients.
As well as meeting all the criteria outlined at this article's introduction (the importance of projecting a professional image, ease of use, etc.), your website needs to:
- Be designed to the highest web standards in the realm of accessibility and usability. Your website should comply with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards, and also be DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) compliant. In short, for a website to be accessible its content must be available to everyone, including people with disabilities. Learn more about accessibility and usability Also check that once you site is launched you own the design copyright!
- Have a user friendly URL/domain name (website address), and one that is registered to you and not your web designer, so that you own your website outright.
- Be 'table-free' and use valid code. Learn more about web standards.
- Be easy to navigate (with intuitive layout and links to other pages all being clearly recognisable and working).
- Be search engine friendly - No one can buy from your website if they can't find it online. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a powerful marketing technique that involves imbedding relevant (and researched) keywords and phrases into your on-page text, and into the code behind each page, using ethical practice. This process will help make your website more visible on the internet by driving it up the search engines' page listings. Learn more about SEO and also find out why building SEO into your website from day one is so important.
- Include original text (not plagiarised copy) - A professional web designer will only use original copy - copy that is simple, powerful and unique. For client supplied copy a good web designer will help to optimise the copy for the search engines or provide advise on the best tools to use to identify relevant keywords and the best optimisation techniques.
Your website will also need to:
- Work in different browsers - Your website needs to work perfectly across modern and older web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, etc. - these are software programs that interpret the coding language of the World Wide Web in graphic form, displaying the translation rather than the coding). A professional web designer will decide which browsers to support and to what level before starting to build a Cascading Style Sheet layout for your website. Your pages will then be properly tested to ensure they work perfectly.
- Work well when printed and when displayed on different hand-held devices, like Smartphones and PDAs (personal digital assistants).
- Be reliably hosted from day one, so that your website can always be found quickly on the Internet, 24/7 and all-year-round, with instant connectivity being virtually guaranteed.
And finally and extremely important:
- Your website needs to be current and updated to ensure you maintain your place in the search engines. This may mean using a
content management system, a blog or having a support plan.
Choosing a Professional Web Designer
Opting for expert web design will ensure your business does well online.
It's important to choose a web designer who designs and codes to W3C standards for accessibility and usability and fully understands how to optimise your site for the search engines, without these skills your website will languish.
If you're concerned that your current website may not be performing as well as it could or you want to check that your site is fully optimised and meets the aforementioned UK legal requirements, why not submit your site for a review?
Contact us if you would like to talk through your website concerns.
