Customer Service and Trust

You can also think of your website like a customer service representative. It’s the digital face of your business, and you want to make a good first impression.

A poorly designed website is akin to a rude, unhelpful customer service rep. A well-designed website, on the other hand, is like a polite, friendly rep that goes out of his or her way to help customers in any capacity. Which one do you think results in happy customers, and sets the foundation for a lasting relationship?

As for trust, the concept is similar. Would you trust a business located in a seedy, back-alley building with cracked windows and trash covering the entrance path? Of course not. Humans are visual creatures, and putting your best web design foot forward is absolutely critical in moving potential customers further down the sales funnel.

Competition

At the most basic level, you should invest in some level of web design because your competitors are most likely already doing it. If your site looks shoddy and amateur, and a direct competitor’s site looks professional and trustworthy, potential customers will choose your competitor.

You can go even further than simply bringing your website up to par with the competition, however. Splurging on web design even a little bit for a stellar design is a fantastic way of setting yourself apart from competitors.

Most businesses within an industry have essentially the same pool of resources to pull from when building their services. You all have access to the same information, studies, pricing tiers, and so on. Web design is one of the only areas where you can go above and beyond, making your business appear to be the obvious choice through a gorgeously crafted website.

Consistency and Coherency

People like consistency, especially online. If every one of your pages looks different, uses different fonts, and is laid out differently, many users will move on to the next option. Any website that’s even mildly successful uses the same set of format, style, and typeface guidelines that serve as the backbone for all pages. This ensures a sense of consistency as users navigate through your website, and makes the entire experience more coherent and streamlined.

One of the underlying goals of web design is to minimize distractions on your website, because even the slightest discrepancy or inconsistency can result in a lost lead.

Search Engine Optimization

Many web design elements and practices influence how you publish content on your website, which in turn affects how search engine spiders crawl and index your website. This is one thing you cannot afford to mess up. If your on-page SEO fundamentals are not up to snuff, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle for visibility from the start.

Aside from how content is published on your website, certain web design elements can directly affect SEO in and of themselves. Web design can be difficult to understand if you’re not familiar with how it works, but to put it simply, your code needs to be SEO-friendly. The best way to ensure proper web design practices (and subsequent search engine visibility) is to partner up with a web design agency that knows what they’re doing.