What are the benefits of a well-designed website?

Good website design is just as important as the copywriting on the page. As a business operating in the digital age, having a functioning website should be right at the top of your priorities when looking at potential routes to market. Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every single day (Internet Live Stats, 2022). Unless you’re selling sand in Saudi Arabia, a portion of those searches will be for the product or service you offer.

If you already have a website, you may be seeing a number of search engine users (from Google, Bing, etc.) browsing your website but not necessarily making purchases, sending enquiries, or even moving beyond your homepage.

By simply adapting the layout and usability of your website, you can take full advantage of the FREE live leads supplied by Google every single day.

What constitutes good website design?

In its simplest form, website design comprises a handful of elements: colours, fonts, images and logos. There are many factors that constitute good website design. Below, we’ve listed 4 of the main website design pillars that we implement across all our website projects.

Determine your brand guidelines

The first step we take when approaching any website design project is to ensure we have an up-to-date set of brand guidelines. Brand guideline documents outline how colours, fonts and logos should be used across all branded collateral and provide the building blocks for any corporate design project.

Choose content that is visually engaging

Treat your website as your online portfolio. It’s a digital asset with the sole purpose of increasing sales. Utilise relevant images and titles that tell your story before the user has had time to read the copy.

Make your customer’s lives easy!

You may have noticed with the rise of Vine and then TikTok, the content returning the most engagement is getting shorter and shorter. The same applies for website design.

By planning out your content into bitesize chunks and limiting the number of clicks a user must make, you’re making their life easier. By giving your customers the key information and utilising a Call to Action (CTA), you can guide them towards a purchase without having to interact via phone or email.

This is an example of User Experience or UX conscious design.

Consistency is key

The final pillar of good website design is simply to ensure you implement all the above consistently. This means making sure each of the pages on the website follow the patterns you’ve set out with your homepage. The size of H1 headings should stay the same throughout the website, the same goes for H2 and H3, etc.

Colours and design cues should be fluid between pages and images should be of the same style and quality. If you’re just starting off and don’t have high quality images, stock images can always help as a short-term solution! We recommend trying to replicate and replace stock images as soon as possible as they can look unauthentic.

By following the above practices, good website design can increase the retention rate of users on your site. By keeping users engaged with your content, you’re instantly increasing its worth and Google recognises this! Google will track where your web traffic has come from and the more users that interact with your content, the higher it will rank for the search terms that sent them there.

So, whether you’re looking to build a website in-house or use an agency, remember to design with your customers in mind.