So, you are not sure how to design a professional site in 2020? — No worries, we’ve got your back.
In today’s digital age where the identity and authenticity of your business so much depend on having an online presence, it has become a necessity to design a professional website to meet the industry standards and build trust.
What Is Web Design?
Web designing includes a lot of aspects from developing the website, designing its layout, creating the content, adding functionalities, making it user friendly etc., all this while keeping in mind what would appeal to your audience.
Learn about the best practices of web designing and SEO to how much it costs to design a professional website, this article address all the necessary information.
Importance of a Well-Designed Website
Why is it so important to design a professional website and how exactly is it going to help you? If you are wondering this, here are some of the important objectives that a well-designed website helps to achieve:
1. User Experience(UX)
The crucial thing to keep in mind is for whom the end product is being developed, your audience. It is significant to provide them with good user experience.
Most web pages face a high bounce rate due to poor web designing. Even though you might have great services to offer if you aren’t able to retain the visitors on your page, it’s highly unlikely to get a conversion.
2. Digital Outreach
The whole point of developing a website is to create brand awareness and social reach, and social media is a great tool to achieve this. Making your website available on social media platforms unfolds many ways to reach the end-users.
When you design a professional website, it includes SEO to get organic traffic to your web page, which is vital. Yet, paid ads, promotions, email etc., on social channels helps in expanding your customer base manifolds.
3. Credibility
Establishing your website credibility will ensure the trustworthiness and authority of your page. Customers are more likely to rely upon and visit again once they find your page genuine.
There are many ways of achieving this:
- A major percentage of it is based on the design of your website as mentioned earlier.
- The information/content available on your website and how useful and accurate it is for your audience.
- Testimonials of your services, using backlinks, speed test, etc., will further increase the authenticity of the website.
- A call-to-action button, contact page info, etc., should be easily visible/accessible on your page.
Most of the above-mentioned pointers are part of SEO(Search Engine Optimization) which is discussed later in the article to give you a better understanding of the concept.
6 Tips on How to Design a Professional Website
1. Navigation(UX Design)
Think of any website you visit often or where you spend more time. What do you like about it? Most often visitors continue to re-visit and spend longer time on the website if it is designed in a user-friendly way and has easy navigation between pages.
Designing user interface includes few factors to consider such as the page layout, color schema, the typography or print which is adjusted with all screen types, etc.
Try to keep the design minimalist and still enough information for the users to make sense of what you have to offer. Websites cluttered with too much information or difficult to navigate will have a much higher bounce rate.
2. Authoritative Content
How to write authoritative content for a blog post when the internet is swarming with hundreds of websites in the same domain with good and bad quality content. It is important to distinguish your website with original, unique and genuine information.
Your audience will see through if the material on your website is not genuine. Spend time on gaining more knowledge or hire subject matter experts to write for you. Once a tone of confidence and ingenuity reflects in your content, it will automatically establish authority.
These metrics can be checked through Domain Authority(DA) which defines the ranking strength of a website and Page Authority (PA) is a measurement for ranking of a single page on a website.
3. Higher Ranking
Rankings are referred to as the position where particular search results are placed. For example, in the image, when I searched for “WordPress for beginners”, there are few results that pop up. The ones that show first are ranked higher.
These are all organic results. Google ranks a website higher on its search results page based on a lot of factors that I will share later in this article. These are of-course excluding ads, and paid promotions which you might see in the below image.
These are not organic search results rather paid marketing.
Google’s search algorithms look at many factors for ranking such as the quality of the content, page usability and ease, traffic on the page, the page speed, whether it is search engine optimized, mobile-friendly, etc.
Therefore, all these factors are important to keep in mind when you design a professional website so that it would fetch a better ranking.
4. Keywords
Keywords are the queries that users put on google search. Using relevant keywords helps the search engine to crawl to your page and rank them up in search results.
Although there are many keywords in SEO, I will explain three types of keywords that are more important and commonly used, namely, short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, and geo-targeting keywords. You can find more details about keywords here: Types of Keywords
- Short-Tail keywords: These keywords usually use one or two-word searches. For example: “Website Design” is a short-tail keyword. It does specify whether you want a web design course, web design agency, web design definition, etc. Such keywords are commonly used by people while searching for information about a particular topic or trend.
- Long-Tail keywords: “How to design a professional-looking website” is an example of a long-tail keyword. It explains the exact intent of the user and will display results that best suit its purpose.
- Geo-Targeting keywords: This will help location-based search on google. If you search for “Web design agency in Chicago”, google will list all the agencies in that location as shown in the image below.
You can register your business location through Google My Business to get listed in search queries.
5. Mobile friendliness
With the growing use of handheld devices and so many mobile applications available for everyday tasks, users are spending much more time browsing through their phones.
It is therefore crucial that your website must be mobile-friendly to reach larger sections of the audience.
6. Site Speed
The amount of time taken to load your web page can decide whether the user wants to keep browsing at your website. The faster response, the better is user experience.
Site speed can be affected by a couple of things including where your website is hosted, what kind of content you have on your page is just text, or images or videos, etc.
If so many details are overwhelming and you wondering how to design a professional website, hire a professional website designer to take off that load from you and let the experts manage.
Hiring a Professional Web Design Agency
If you do not have the expertise for web designing, here are few things to consider before hiring a web design agency:
- Compare web design services from different agencies and understand the market scenario.
- Determine the budget for your design expenses before hiring. How much does a professional website design cost can vary from vendors depending on the services included?
- Ensure they understand your requirements well, convey the kind of layout, features, theme etc., you need in your website.
- Enquire about their expertise in this field and refer testimonials to get a better idea.
- Understand the scope of their services and ensure the delivery timelines to avoid any delay in project launch.
Cost of a professional website design will depend on whether you are doing it yourself vs hiring a professional website designer to do it for you.
Is Hiring a Web Design Agency the Way to Go?
Now that you know the fundamentals of web designing, the next question is how to build one. Should you do it yourself or should you hire a professional website designer? How much does a professionally designed website cost?
If you have the expertise to design a professional website, you can save yourself some good bucks in building and managing the site yourself. In this case, the cost involved would be to buy a domain, a server to host it, backup for the content, security services, etc.
There are many hosting plans available in the market with different packages and features. The rates start as low as $7/month to as high as $1000/month. Do your research well on what services are essential before you make the purchase. Here is an example of how a WordPress dashboard to manage the website looks like.
Although, if you do not possess the skills and need assistance in achieving a great design layout and functionalities for your website, leave it to the experts and you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritties.
Conclusion
You would have to make this call depending upon how much time you have in hand. Follow the fundamentals of web designing which are necessary to implement while developing a website and obtain the desired results. Alternately, seek assistance from the industry experts.
