Benefits of Having a Good Website Design

Website design means creating the workflow of a website, and then accordingly designing its front-end and back-end. Websites constitute >50% of a netizen’s Internet experience, with about 200 million websites active worldwide. As per Statista, an average netizen browses 10-130 websites daily, and even more on holidays and weekends. Website usage increased multifold during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people couldn’t visit stores physically, and purchased from websites. Websites today serve as the primary face of brands, as customers today assess brands online before making a purchase.

Benefits of Having a Good Website Design

Why is Website Design Important?

A well-designed website makes a big impact on customer engagement and brand image. Rather than worrying about whether the website should be static, dynamic, or single page, the focus should be on developing an excellent website design. Poorly designed websites irreparably destroy user experiences and brand images, no matter how good the products/services are. Customers face at least 1-3 website issues (like the infamous “404 response”, server timeout, and more) daily. During peak rush hours multiple websites crash, a common example being during board exam results. So, there’s a lot of improvement urgently required in website design departments, both nationally and internationally.

Benefits of a Good Website Design

• Smooth interactions: Every webpage has smooth interactions with the user, with all buttons and elements responding instantly on tapping/clicking. (We all get extremely irritated with the websites whose buttons, no matter how hard we tap on our phones, just don’t respond)
• Responsive: Functions optimally, smoothly and equally well from all devices – be it a laptop, desktop, smartphone, tablet, or anything else. As per Statista, over 60% of the world’s netizens access Internet from phones.
• Aesthetically pleasing: The clutter-free, beautiful design of a well-designed website is soothing on the eye and keeps the user coming back for more.
• Enormous satisfaction for both user and owner: Well-designed websites mean happier users, which translates to happier, better satisfied website owner(s).
• Improves digital literacy, bridges digital divide: Many elderly people are not tech-savvy. On finding poorly designed websites, their frustration at the non-working buttons makes them believe that their digital skills are not improving, decreasing their confidence. Well-designed websites enhance their confidence by fulfilling needs seamlessly.
• Higher rank in browser results: Better user experiences mean better feedback plus more recommendations. This pushes up your website’s rank in browser search results via Search Engine Optimization (SEO), increases traffic, rate of conversions from visitors/leads to customers.
• Scroll-friendly, paginated lists: Netizens mostly scroll. A good website design implements pagination algorithms for sleek scrolling, as items are commonly rendered in lists, requiring them to be shown few at a time for not taking up unnecessary space.
• Fulfils purpose in 5 seconds or less: We are busy people, quickly deciding if a website solves our purpose or not. A well-designed website solves quickly.
• Impressive digital identity and footprint to the owner: Stellar website stands as an impressive accomplishment in today’s real world.

Best Practices to Design a Good Website Design

• Effective use of whitespace: Whitespace is strategically placed to create a minimalistic effect, reduce clutter and enhance the website’s aesthetics.
• Design and layout altogether clearly indicate Call to Action (CTA): A portfolio website screams “hire me”, a shopping website screams “buy from me”. If someone wants to buy organic, freshly made face packs, they will search brands selling these, ask their friends for recommendations. Then, they scan recommended website(s) for 5-6 seconds, checking whether it fulfils their purpose, then either stay or leave. So, design every webpage keeping the CTA in mind.
• Intelligent blend of fonts, colors and other visual elements: They altogether create an easy-on-the-eye, captivating, cohesive look of all sections of the website. Limited use of a variety of fonts, colors is crucial, as too many distort the overall look and feel.
• Easy Navigation: Examples of poor navigation include obsolete links. One should regularly clear “link junk”, i.e., all non-working links. Often, links to external websites get updated, so your links show errors.

Practices to Avoid

• Cluttering, disorganization: Content should be curated, organized and clutter-free to ensure the user doesn’t feel overburdened while searching. Whitespace must be used strategically to demarcate sections.
• Multiple nested dropdowns: They frustrate the user out of their wits, more so if the lists feature duplicates. Also, hampers experience of users using screen readers or other assistive technologies.
• “lorem ipsum” instead of actual content: Some lesser-known companies litter sections of their websites with dummy content, instantly turning off an interested user.
• Inadequate security: Zero-day vulnerabilities should be immediately patched without laxity. Many people think about design, aesthetics, frontend and backend, but how many people care about security? Multiple cyber-attacks occur on websites- SQL Injection, DDoS, ransomware, and more. Web Application Firewalls (WAF) protect your website from common cyber-attacks.
• Unoptimized for low bandwidth: Many cannot afford expensive data plans. Network issues keep happening, so even affluent people can have low bandwidths. So, it’s essential your website is designed optimally so that users with Internet issues don’t face troubles surfing your website. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) speed up websites.
• Useless help & support section: Users face problems inevitably some time or the other. However, an automated chatbot which never adequately address their concerns and an always switched off helpline number causes users to badmouth it, decreasing word-of-the-mouth promotions.

Conclusion

A buttery smooth user experience via an excellent website design is extremely important for elevating your personal/company’s brand, and helps you stand out. Website design is an ever-evolving process, as user requirements and competitors’ websites both consistently upgrade. There’s nothing more off-putting than a trashy website, even if your customer services are superb. Hence, to achieve a good website design it’s critical to maintain harmony between the processes of ideation, design, development, security audit and optimization to create the best ever website that you can be proud of even after 20-30 years in this world, where change is the only constant. For a software developer, a well-designed website is a big milestone in showcasing their development and design skills to the entire tech community, at a single click.