Website design plays a huge part in how your audience views your website, and a poor web design will create a negative perspective over your business and your brand. It affects the trustworthiness and legitimacy of your brand, leading to potential customers being deterred away from your brand. With 94% of users citing that web design as the reason they mistrust or reject a website (IronPaper), if your website is poorly designed, you could be missing out on 94% of customers.

Importance of web design:

• Build credibility and trust – First impressions matter and having a website that sets a tone with you and your audience. A well-designed website not only helps you outshine your competitors, but also helps to boost the legitimacy of the content on your site.
• Branding – Having a website that is representative of your brand, including the colour scheme, tone of voice, as well as the typography, will help to ensure consistency throughout your site, making sure that your website looks clean throughout. A good web design will help to reflect on your brand meaning that if your website looks professional, people will instantly feel that your brand and business is professional.
• Increase engagement - People tend to engage and interact more with websites that are well-presented. With clear navigation, your customers will be able to interact with your site, resulting in a much better experience for the customer. It will also help to reduce the bounce rate of your site, as clear navigation helps to reduce the amount of confusion faced by the customer.
• SEO – A well-structured, SEO-optimised site will help to increase your overall search rankings on Google as well as increase traffic to your site. This is because a well-structured site will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index the site, leading to better rankings.
• Competitive advantage – A well sophisticated looking website will help you to stand out from your competitors and will aid in convincing your audience in choosing you instead of them.

What makes a poor design:

It may seem that a poor website design is more than just how your website looks. There are several factors that contribute to a website being poorly designed. One of the major factors is functionality and usability. How easy the website is to use plays a huge part in how your audience feels about your website. If a button doesn’t work, or if the page takes too long to load, it can lead to your customer becoming increasingly frustrated, and may result in them looking elsewhere.

Mobile responsiveness is another huge factor determining how people feel towards your website. With over 60.67% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, if your website isn’t responsive to different devices, you could be losing out on a huge chunk of your audience.

Your content is another factor in determining the quality of the design of your website. Poor or lack of content will make your website seem incomplete or unprofessional. It will also provide your audience with no information about what it is you offer and how your products add value. It will also impact your SEO, as a huge part of SEO is the word count and also content that has the relevant keywords inside them.

How to improve your overall website design:

There are many things you can do to improve your website design. Here are some tips to improve your overall website design:

• Consistency: Ensuring that you’re being consistent in the design as well as the colours, typography, and the overall style will help to leverage your website and have a clear sense of branding.
• Reduce the loading speed of your site: Reducing the loading speed of your site will help to improve the traffic to your website. To reduce the traffic of your site, you can compress your images, use caching, and optimising codes are just some of the ways you can improve the site speed. You can also check the site of your speed on PageSpeed Insights which will help you gain a better understanding of why the site is slow and also how to fix it.
• Mobile friendliness: Like we mentioned earlier, mobile responsiveness is crucial for your site, and making sure your website is responsive, will help to give you a huge boost in the number of visitors to your site.
• Clear call to actions: Having clear call to actions that are differently styled to the rest of your content will help to improve the user journey as it helps provides a sense of direction.

How can we help?

At Edmondson's IT Services, we understand that your website is a critical aspect of your business. We know how important it is for you to have a website that not only looks good, but also functions well and is easy for visitors to use. Which is why we are pleased to be able to offer the complete package when it comes to website hosting. From registering your domain, to making the website live, we will be there to ensure your website becomes the online portal you want it to be.

All our websites include on-site SEO, to ensure that your website ranks high in search engines. We accomplish this by targeting the right keywords within your content, ensuring that the website's metadata links to the keyword, and making sure that everything on the page is fully optimised to improve site speed. We also focus on your website's URLs structure, to improve the relevancy of your site.