16 Nov 8 Misconceptions About Website Design
As an account manager in the digital marketing industry, I have noticed that there are some misconceptions about designing a website. Web sites have different purposes depending on who the target audience is. Some websites are created to generate sale leads, others to establish an online presence or ensure a reputable/professional corporate identity. But the main purpose of the website is to provide information to current and potential clients. The object is to promote or market the company on an online platform. Before deciding on the what you want your website to achieve, you need to clearly define who your target market is up-front before the website is fully built. This will make it easier to measure the success or quality of the website. Now that we’ve spoken about the purposes of the website we move on to discuss some of the many misconceptions individuals and groups have regarding what a website can achieve and the process of developing a website for their business.
Misconceptions about websites
When clients render the services of expert organisations like BWD to address a particular shortcoming, they tend to forget that the organisation they have chosen is skilled at what they do and have an extensive record in the Internet sector; designing and developing websites. There are clients who sometimes spend too much time dictating to designers what they expect to see and changing the brief too often. this can cause confusion and it could also be very time consuming, which would result in the the cost of designing the website increasing significantly. In most cases the website misconceptions are caused by lack of communication between the developers and client. Clients often have little knowledge regarding websites and they assume that once the website is published it will automatically get traffic and their sales will increase. This is information that is sometimes not made clear by the agency.
1. Website ranking
To a certain degree web designers are responsible for optimizing the website and ensuring that they load high speed as it is one of the many factors that search engines such as Google rank websites based on speed.
2. Who’s involved in the process
It is imperative to keep everyone on the same page but not beneficial for everyone in the company to be part of the progress meeting. When involving everyone in the process it may cause confusions and arguments. It is advisable to at least have two people that will represent the company and give consolidated feedback. It is easier to revise feedback from two people and still keep a strong design.
3. Website costs
People believe that websites should be cheap. Yes, designers or developer can build a website at a lower cost but it will definitely not have amazing functionalities. People are not aware that to create a beautiful website take time and it’s also costly.
4. Website relevance
Clients usually ask designers for their website to still be relevant in the next 10years.Internet and technology are moving at a rapid speed, also the design style. It is advisable to redesign your website in few years to ensure that you moving with the design trends.
5. Web design difficulty
True anyone can build a basic website, but not everyone can do it very well. But building an impeccable website takes time and some hard work. Responsive websites have become a standard. This means changing and repositioning page elements to fit the screen size.
6. What should stand out
The words in bold will draw the audiences attention to them immediately when they get onto a page. It is for this reason that not everything on the website can be bold and stand out. You need to determine the most important key services and call to actions that you want to draw attention to.
7. How much whitespace
Every website needs a breathing space. Having spaces does not mean that the website was rushed and not enough time was spent on it. Cluttered websites can be confusing to the visitor and they would end up exiting the website too quickly.
8. Who’s responsible for redesigns
Clients usually start with small changes and end up wanting to the whole site to redesigned and they do not want to pay for the cost because they assume it should be done for free. This, however, is the time that the agency has to spend on the site. The reality as we all know is that time costs money.
If you do not want to damage your brand and negatively affect the growth of your business it is always advisable to make use of a professional design agency that has a track record of building high quality website.Remember when creating a website for your business you need to know the purpose of the website and your target market. Remember that developing an impeccable website is costly and time-consuming. Ensure that you do some research and understand how the Internet sector operates.