Posted On:
Why is Web Design Important?
Thunderbolt Digital is a digital agency who specialise in web design Surrey. But just why is web design important? While it is often overlooked, web design is a vital element of any company’s branding, marketing and internet presence, and is a huge factor for search engine optimisation.
A big part of web design Surrey is producing a website people trust. A study called “Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites” established that design was far more powerful than content when encouraging people to trust your brand. When questioned, 94% of people who didn’t trust a website voiced concerns about web design problems, such as text size, colours, font, pop-up advertisements and layout. This alone proves how important it is to have a well thought out design for your website and brand.
While your website design is not your brand, it is a significant brand element that helps you build trust with your users. The researcher Jared M. Spool said that “branding is an investment that grows over time”, and that “brands are perceptions”. The aim of any company image or appearance is to make people think “That’s a brand I trust”.
When deciding on the style of website, it is vital to consider the long term and short term effects of your branding decisions. It is important you don’t fixate on fleeting fads, but you shouldn’t ignore the current trends either. For instance, parallax (one endless page of content to scroll through) is a very popular website format right now. Web designers and developers like it because it keeps users engaged, however, it isn’t SEO friendly as it limits the amount of optimisation. This means these types of websites typically have very short term success, after all, what’s the point of a well designed website if no one can find it?
Another popular, and vital, website format is responsive web design. This basically means that the website will appear in a slightly different format depending on what device is being used to view it. The benefits of this include accessibility from phones, tablets and different sized computer screens, increasing traffic and the amount of time users spend on your website. Search engines encourage this layout, and it has been proven to lower bounce rates.