Having a ‘pretty’ website that may look like a nice piece of ‘art’, is one thing. But if you want it to actually attract visitors and turn clicks into sales, then aesthetics isn’t enough.
Good website design is so much more, it’s about making the user experience work and the core value of what you’re actually trying to achieve – the reason you want and need a website – function correctly.
This is why it’s important that whomever creates your website has actual website development and user experience (UX) knowledge. These tasks, plus the design may be shared over a full development team or it may be one talented freelancer. Someone who’s just a graphic designer by trade (and experience) isn’t right for website design, not without guidance from a website development team. On a layout design proof they may get it to look good. Graphic designers are used to creating media that isn’t interactive. A website on the other hand needs to be responsive, have easy to find calls-to-action, be easy to navigate for the user. As well, of course, look great. An experienced website designer will know how certain items work on a live website and what scripts do and don’t work together.
A graphic designer may see a website that they like the look of and try to emulate it, or at least some aspects of it. But every website is different and every client has different needs for their website.
Before any design and development is started it’s important to research the target audience and the business’s competition. There’s no point doing fancy parallax scrolling website that’s hard to understand where to click next to get information for a demographic that’s not web-savvy like seniors. Not having ‘bells and whistles’ doesn’t mean that it can’t look great. But you must understand your target audience and the goal of the website. Once that’s done, your website developer will offer qualified recommendations and use their expertise to put it all together and work for you and your business.
A good website design team will have tried and tested all types of websites and functions, from eCommerce websites, content management systems (CMS) and the plethora of plugins that come with them, to bespoke development for large corporations. They’ll know what will work for you, ultimately saving your website project time and money.
Do it right, do it once.
At Coast Creative, we offer a free consultation for any website project, whether it’s a brand new site or upgrading or maintaining an existing one. We can also offer SEO and marketing strategies.
Business website and marketing solutions is what we do, since 2002.
