Web Design and the Role of the Web Designer

Web pages designers use the visual element of appearance, layout, and content. The appearance is a blend of colors, fonts, and images.

Color has a psychological impact, and skillful web designer pages use the colors that promote and emphasize the brand rather than ones that clash or send over the wrong message. An appropriate color attracts and encourages brand loyalty. Selecting the right color to express brand personality is where an experienced web designer makes a difference to a web design that attracts attention for all the right reasons.

Fonts need to assist the user in understanding the message. As a minimum, it needs to be clear and easy to read. People understand the world through visual information (predominantly), and the choice of font has a subliminal impact on the viewer. The font style for the body text and headings contributes to how your customers feel about your design. Webpages rely on visual information to influence visitors.

Images are more than a few photos to brighten the page design. Web images, including icons, animations, and infographics, attract attention. The images build an impression of your business in terms of values and offer to a potential customer.

Layout refers to how the elements appear on the page. The web designer needs to consider what looks good for a desktop, tablet, and phone. The layout covers blocks of text, headlines, images, and shapes.

A web designer uses layout the way an artist uses composition to draw the eye in and direct attention with subtle use of shapes and lines. Alternatively, a poor design has potential customers glancing and clicking away. Also, like an artist, a web designer uses space to make the whole better than the sum of its parts. A Japanese chef will never make the mistake of filling a plate until it overflows – a maximum of 75% full lets the dish shine. Empty space is a vital element that enables your design web pages to showcase the content. Content crosses over the areas of appearance and functionality. Content has to give the customer what they need in terms of information and interest, but it also needs to be attractive and easy to navigate.

The web development services pay attention to how the web pages work for the user. Functionality requires careful consideration:

Your website isn’t working for you, and you decide that you need a complete redesign to give your customers a better experience, increase traffic to your website, and ultimately sell more. A website redesign is different from a website refresh. It is a teardown and replacement process involving code and functionality. A regular website redesign keeps you relevant for today’s market and may be necessary for some good reasons:

The average cycle for a website redesign is every two to three years. Sometimes you can get away with a website refresh, but technology and software change quickly, making it more straightforward to redesign rather than tweaking small parts of the website completely.

If the website doesn’t have excellent SEO, then it is unlikely that any searcher will get directions to your website from the commonly used search engines like Google and Bing. Designing your website with SEO in mind means using a web developer who pays attention to the details and provides the search engine crawlers with easy to digest content.

Search engines find it difficult to crawl and rank a site with flash objects. Flash objects are also unfriendly for users with disabilities. If you want to use Flash, you can provide an HTML accessible alternative for the flash content.  Alternatively, check to see if CSS or JavaScript can give you the same effect without giving the crawlers indigestion.

You want to keep your HTML documents free from Scripts – externalize them, so they don’t cause obstructions in the web design pages. Use a straightforward structure for the document with clear, informative headings and enough content to feed the crawlers with information about your web pages.

SEO web design concentrates on ensuring that the web pages function well for search engine purposes because this increases the website’s visibility.

SEO is an ongoing process that you need to pay attention to every day to maintain your ranking and visibility on the internet to your target audience.

Web design is a process of creating the appearance and function of your web pages. It is possible to buy in SEO as part of your web design process, and this feature is desirable because the web design pages help or hinder search engine processes.  

When you buy SEO services as part of a marketing strategy, you are not automatically getting an upgraded website as part of the service.

The search engine sends out robots to crawl through all the web pages, searching for those that are relevant and detailed enough to give the best response to the searcher’s needs. SEO signals to the crawlers that your pages have what the searcher needs this time. If your website has weak or nonexistent SEO, then the crawlers will select other web pages ahead of yours as being better for the potential customer. SEO increases your visibility, and you need visibility to attract customers.

There are plenty of options for getting your words written at a reasonable cost.

Most people have heard of keywords and have a vague knowledge that these are “key” to making sure that your web pages are listed higher than your competitors when someone searches for your type of products or services.

Search Engine Optimization depends on the algorithms used by the search engine crawlers to rank your web page, and these assess the content or the words on the page before deciding on where to place your pages on the list of potential answers to the searcher’s query. SEO writing does involve making sure the most appropriate words and phrases feature prominently (and naturally)  in the text to signpost to crawlers that these are the pages their searcher needs. But it also means writing interesting, informative, and factually correct writing with excellent grammar.  

Once the searcher licks on your page, they can click away again if the writing doesn’t deliver the content in an easy to read and exciting way.

There are plenty of options for getting your words written at a reasonable cost.

Facebook posts with less than 80 characters, and an image gets more attention than a post using the whole 63,206-character allowance. People go on Facebook for fun and entertainment. It is an ideal medium for promoting a link to your blog or video. You are looking to grab attention and direct the person somewhere else.

Twitter gives you up to 140 characters, but you can also include videos, polls, images, and other tweets. The optimum length of a tweet to promote click-through is around 120-130 characters. Remember to include a hashtag or two, but don’t overdo it. Twitter can drive traffic to your Facebook pages and your website.

LinkedIn gives plenty of options for sharing content of all sizes and is an excellent place to share your blog content to gain a greater audience.  For a long-form article, you get up to 100 characters for the headline and a substantial 40,000 character count for the body text.

Instagram and Snapchat are both visual mediums, but you still need headlines and captions. Content writing for social media needs an ability to be concise and attention-grabbing.

This form of copywriting sells your product, brand, or service.  Ecommerce copywriting covers more than product description; it includes the about pages, customer service messages, and any other content involved with selling to online customers.

Ecommerce writing at its best builds a link between you and your customers by engaging them with your company story and values.

An eCommerce website offers your customers the ability to buy direct, and the website design needs to include the features that make this process secure and easy to use.

Then there are the standard website features that promote other websites but are crucial to the success of an eCommerce website:

All websites have similar features, but eCommerce websites require a different range of capabilities to an information and contact website.

Key performance indicators or KPI is essential in any business, and eCommerce is a business run online. There are hundreds if not thousands of potential KPI to choose from – the crucial thing is to pick the ones that indicate success or the need to try harder in some areas.

Ecommerce websites give you access to data that is impossible to collect in a bricks and mortar store like:

Also, you get all the other useful and valuable data about site traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing.

With Google Analytics, you can set up tracking to give you the KPIs automatically to measure the effectiveness of your eCommerce business operation covering all the critical areas of sales, marketing, performance, customer service, and, if appropriate, manufacturing. When you set goals, you ascribe a numerical value to that goal so you can set a KPI that shows your progress towards achieving that goal. It is a simple dashboard light that says if you are on target or falling short of your goal. By tracking the activity that is important to your success, you can take action to improve your whole business by identifying and removing barriers to sales and customer satisfaction and retention.

A conversion orientated website has the primary goal of persuading visitors to convert to buyers through the design and content of the webpages. The principles are:

Card and other magic tricks work because the magician influences the member of the audience to make the right choice. To persuade your visitors to make the right choice on the page:

The first page the visitor sees needs to meet their expectations – one size does not fit all.  If someone turns up wanting a free trial, they don’t want to see a whole load of other options. Nor a generic landing page, when they must navigate to their offer.

A clear, logical step by step process converts a visitor smoothly into the buying stage. Make it smooth and friction-free.

Put your call to action at the top of the page and not the bottom – most people won’t bother getting down as far as the bottom of the page. If they want to buy what you are selling, don’t make it difficult for them.

To convert a visitor to a buyer, they need to believe it is what they need – don’t be shy and tell them everything you can do for them.  As part of this process, bring in the power of the crowd – you can tell them how many other people have bought the same product or service. Plus, you can make it personal by linking to Facebook and showing which of their friends is on board. When you want your website to help your customers to buy more, you need to design it to convert browsers to buyers with a conversion design website.

Our professional team are experts at what they do from building in the front and back stack to picking the right colors and shapes. We put together the right team to take your vision and goals and deliver a web site that meets your needs.  Not only for today but as your online business and presence expand.  

We design, create, maintain, refresh, and keep you on top of the latest technology and processes. Whatever you need, we’ve got you covered with people who care about developing the best business websites.