Introduction – Ugly or Attractive – Why the look of a website Matters!
Why does poor web design hurt your credibility?
Why does bad design drive away a potential customer?
People prefer to view content on beautifully-designed websites, and if your website is unattractive, you’re likely losing more than 25% of your visitors!
In this article, I’ll be explaining why the way a website looks is important. Many Business owners don’t think a website’s appearance is that important, and they tend to just put out paragraphs of content in a white space expecting to improve sales. If you would like an example, simply look at an accountant’s website! They tend to have boring websites filled with even more boring information about tax…
The Brain
Emotion is the deciding factor in all decision-making. Two things our brains hate is risk & hard work – with websites, an unappealing website full of text, paragraph after paragraph, makes it hard work for the brain to process and read all the information. Because of this, a potential prospect will leave that site and look for another site that’s visually appealing.
Now a good design is a matter of opinion, however, there is an obvious difference between this:
And This:
Which one are you more likely to read after the first few seconds of looking at both.
Yes, the content you put out may be useful and helpful to people that visit your site, but you need to present it in a way that’s visually appealing. Use emotion!
The Journey
A website’s design has a massive impact on how easy it is for visitors to find what they’re looking for on your website. Visitors want to see product or service information, contact information, accreditations, case studies, testimonials etc. This information needs to be easy to find and appealing to the eye. If the information is difficult to find, it will most likely frustrate the prospect, and they will move on to a competitor’s website.
When potential prospects visit your website, they want to quickly find the information that they are looking for. The website’s design should make that process easier and help visitors navigate the website without getting lost or confused.
A great design will tell potential prospects where you want them to look. On your website, your design can draw attention to special offers and calls to action. An appealing call-to-action button that stands out will get visitors to press the button, overall improving your website’s conversion rate. Notice the difference with the call to actions in the images above.
The more user-friendly a website is, the more likely it is that your potential prospects will engage with your content, which ultimately will lead to a higher conversion rate.
The Brand Image
A website is a reflection of the brand. It is one of the first things people look at to get to know a brand and contributes to a potential prospect’s first impression. Colours, fonts, layouts, etc. are all part of your brand identity. When designing a website, you need to keep the same consistent theme across your website, making your brand more memorable.
If using a website designer, they need to ask you about your brand – Brand colours, fonts etc. When starting from scratch, you need to pick your website elements carefully. With colours, some research into what each colour is associated with will help with your brand image, for example a fun colour to use would be orange, a trustworthy colour to use would be blue. To find out which colours work well with each other, consider using a tool such as create a palette.
The Target Audience
Research must be done into your target audience, and this is where landing pages come in. Content should be created and presented in a way that appeals to your target audience! With each target audience the content and design would need to change slightly, this is where landing pages come in. Creating a page specifically for each target audience is a great strategy that will increase a website’s conversion rate.
Are you targeting Accountants?
Are you targeting Teenagers?
Are you B2c or B2B?
If you were targeting accountants, the design of your website would look a lot more professional with more white space, while if you were targeting teenagers, the design would be more funky, colourful with fancy animations.
You must identify and research your target audience to make your website more appealing to them!
Conclusion
After reading this article, you should now have a better understanding on why the look of a website Matters. Ideally, like Yello Creations do, a website designer should be working with a graphics designer of some kind when designing a website.
Before we design a website, a style sheet and website prototype is created to ensure that the client is happy with the design. Any good web agency company needs these pre-design steps to bring out the full design potential of a website.
