You have a few milliseconds to make the right impression.
There’s only one chance to make the right first impression. Whether dressing sharp for a job interview or meeting
your significant other’s parents for the first time. Getting off on the right foot from the start is crucial – It’s no different regarding your website.
According to the Taylor & Francis Group, your site only has a whopping .05 seconds to get peopleโs โ to make a good first impression!
Good web design is the key to making that first impression count. You can either convert or have visitors bounce due to a poor design that doesn’t tell your story in a compelling way.
A website is likely the first thing new customers encounter. If your websiteโs design falls short, you might lose that potential customer to another business with โall the right stuff – contemporary design, professionally written copy, and good UX – User Experience.
Table of Contents
Web design based on branding
Before we draft our first design concept, we will learn about your company’s goals and develop a site architecture to complement the goals. Any competent web agency should not overlook this stage.
We begin the design process by considering the company’s goals and researching the brand. Is the brand serious, playful, or neutral?
We need to understand your business and its requirements to identify what features your website needs and design them in a way that works for your end users.
Good web design create trust
The product or service youโre offering could be the Next Big Thing, but if your website looks stuck in the โ90s, people will think you are too.
Look at it this way, which of the two dentistry sites below are you more likely to trust taking care of your teeth with the most up-to-date technology?
Bad Design Creates a Lack of Trust
The value of good web design reigns supreme – 94% of people blame bad website design for their lack of trust.
If that frightening statistic wasn’t enough to get your attention, consider what it means for your company: Customers won’t put their faith in your business if your website isn’t easy on the eyes. That affects everything from clickthrough rates to revenue, as consumers become less likely to engage with unreliable brands.
Brand Perception
Aesthetic greatly impacts how potential customers perceive your brand.
For example, your expectations are set when you walk into a Ritz Carlton or other premium hotels. You expect nothing less than a luxury experience. There are less expensive hotels that offer excellent accommodations, but how do you want to be perceived?
Consider whether your website can compete nationally or if it appears to be local. We always build with the idea that our clients, regardless of size, will compete worldwide – We want the Ritz perception. That is why, if you do not have the skill in-house, it is vital to employ a website design agency that understands the principles of good web design.
Website credibility is based on design
According to a Stanford study, 75% of individuals rate an organization based on their website design. This affects their feelings and where they are in the user experience. Itโs the difference between attending a client meeting in smart business attire or wearing shabby leisurewear. You only have one chance to make a great first impression!
We discussed the significance of site design before. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
(In fact, pictures are processed in the brain 60,000 times faster than words.)
Perhaps this is why web design influences visitors’ perceptions of your companyโand why first impressions are largely design-related. It is quicker (and easier) for us to understand a website by looking at it rather than reading lines of boring text.
Think about how fast you contextualize a website based on the overall aesthetic, including some catchy headlines. We view carefully crafted headlines and taglines as part of the visual picture.
The fix is in the design.
The solution is pretty straightforward. Improving your websiteโs design and user experience is the most effective method of preventing users from leaving your site based on a snap judgment. Good design always includes professionally produced assets like photography, video, and animation. The following are pillars of all sites with good web design.
Website Speed
Speed, or how fast your website pages load, is another critical factor in preventing people from bouncing off your site. Having your site load quickly is crucial because visitors aren’t interested in waiting.
Page speed is one of the key factors in whether your users will stay or bounce. So simply put, if your website is faster than your competitors, you immediately have a leg over them. If your site runs on WordPress and you’re looking for ways to make your site run a little smoother, here are some tips for getting your website up to speed.
โข A site that loads in one-second converts three times faster than one that takes five seconds. ( Source PORTENT, 2022)
โข Nearly 70% of Consumers Say Page Speed Impacts Their Purchasing Decisions. (Source Search Journal, 2019)
Consistency
The cliche โConsistency is keyโ exists because itโs true for good web design and every design field. Delivering a consistent experience is pivotal for your website, visually and functionally.
No successful brand can thrive unless its design is consistent. Consistency in brand identity is one of the most important pillars of recognition. It’s no secret that consistency is a best practice in everything from visual design to user experience. However, it is frequently overlooked. Every piece of your brand’s design aesthetic should appear to be cohesive. Each item complements the other, resulting in information that is balanced and easy to comprehend.
Fonts, colors, copy, navigation, everything, and anything users interact with. Make it a consistent experience every time. Otherwise, the site might be perceived as visually confusing and breaking brand continuity.
Thoughtful Design and UX
Good web design is more than just pleasing to the eye. Itโs also intuitive and easy to get around. We call this UX in the business โ User Experience. Everything that we are discussing here involves UX consideration.
Remember, web design accounts for 94% of first impressions.
The phraseย “good design is invisible”ย is frequently heard in the design field. Of course, this also applies to good user experience.
You have an excellent user experience if your user’s interaction is so fluid that they can go from point A to point B on autopilot. Create less friction for the end-user and think about the design and usability holistically.
Professionally Produced Assets
Your website is only as strong as its weakest link. If one of your assets is weak, people will focus on that and ignore whatever other expertly crafted content you may have.
Think about having a professionally produced video on your banner, then populating the rest of the website with videos produced with a cell phone by your best friend’s cousin’s brother.
Successful businesses regularly use professionally generated assets to preserve visual coherence and a unified branding story. A good, polished appearance must always be maintained, which calls for high-quality design elements.
Consumer turnoffs include weak introductory content, small type, long and tedious text, poor spacing, no continuity, and a site with no soul โ think PowerPoint. You can avoid these mishaps by thinking critically about your online strategy and allocating the resources to have a professionally designed website.
Where Web Design and Science Meet
Experienced web agencies will employ experience, research, and overall best practices to guarantee that websites or landing pages are launched optimally. This is not the end of the development cycle, but the finest websites are regularly improved. Successful websites, like Olympic competitors, never stop striving to improve. And A/B testing is the only reliable technique to optimize your website.
A/B testing is a marketing exercise that uses recorded user data to evaluate which of two (or more) webpage variants generates better results.
Half of your visitors will see version A at random, while the other will see variation B. The winning variety is used, while the loser can be archived or deleted based on whether one performed better. It’s equal parts marketing, and science.
This will allow you to iterate on design ideas big and small.
Final Thoughts
Website development is an ever-evolving field. It’s difficult to foresee the future of the web, and you can expect some design elements that are popular now won’t be desirable in the future.
Remember that a website is never “done” after its initial design, even if you adhere to all the “best practices.” Sites that have been updated recently are seen as more reliable by visitors. This also sends trust signals to Google’s algorithm.
Commit to keeping up with web design stats and current trends. Use them in your website redesign to show that you’re up-to-date.
Speaking of first impressions, weโd love to hear from you. We are proud of our work and love what we do. Feel free to contact us if you want to design a new website that will be sure to capture your audience’s attention.
