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This is a common mantra we hear a lot in Zanzibar and Tanzania; “A website is not important anymore…Social Media is more important now right?” Wrong!!
Social Media is important but it has not replaced the need for a well-designed website. An outdated, confusing or broken website will hurt your brand and your business. We are not saying it might hurt your brand, we’re saying it will hurt it.
So how can you get a website that succeeds? You can create an awesome website by absolutely nailing your web design from the beginning. But what is web design, actually? Read on if you want to learn what web design is all about, why it matters and how to get it right.
Web design is what creates the overall look and feel when you’re using a website. It’s the process of planning, building the elements of your website and putting it all together, from functionality, structure and layout to images, colours, fonts and graphics.
Web design has numerous components that work together to create the finished ‘experience’ of a website, including graphic design, user experience design, interface design, search engine optimization (SEO) and content creation.
In Tanzania and East Africa we have noted that the Tourism sector is still extremely blasé about Search Engine Optimisation. Many businesses, tour companies and hotels believe that just having a website is all that is needed. We often ask CEO’s and business owners, to type into Google the phrase they think a potential customer will use to find their website on the internet. “Best Hotel in Zanzibar”, “Recommended Safaris Tanzania”, or “Top Tours in East Africa”. How close to the top of the search results do their businesses appear? If it is not on the front page, then it matters not how beautiful their website is… it will not be seen! SEO is an important element to website design and development.
Web design is different from web development, which is the actual coding that makes a website work. When you’re building a website, you need both web design and web development. Although you can find web designers who are also web and UX (User Experience) developers, these are distinct skill sets. We have a team of seven in Simply IT to cover all the elements of website design and website development.
Here’s what your website will look like in its earliest stages:
Web design is different from web development, which is the actual coding that makes a website work. When you’re building a website, you need both web design and web development. Although you can find web designers who are also web and UX (User Experience) developers, these are distinct skill sets. We have a team of seven in Simply IT to cover all the elements of website design and website development.
Web designers take your ideas and turn them into a mock-up that shows what your future website will look like. Web designers handle the creative part of designing a website.
Web developers—also sometimes called technicians, engineers or coders — take the mock-up made by your web designer and then translate it into a coding language so it can be displayed on the web. They make websites functional, which often means custom-coding widgets, scripts and other tools.
A user experience developer, also known as a UX developer, is the one who makes your website user-friendly. They have technical skills as well as design skills and put them to work creating websites that attract and keep visitors.
So don’t just rely on what you think looks good, or what you think works best. Ask others. Market Research is an important part of good website design.
Good website designers not only design for their clients, they also ask others what they think about a certain design. So if you are having your website designed or redesigned, make sure you ask a good percentage of your present customers to assess the new design and make suggestions. Design is not just about what a website looks like, it has to work well and give a good experience for your customers. So ask them what they think! The cardinal sin of many a CEO is to think they know what customers will think or do when they visit the website. Don’t fall into the same trap… ask them!
Web design that works is web design that converts. In marketing terms; “convert” means getting the user to take a specific action.
When a user does go to your website and follows through with an action that your website set them up to take, your website made a conversion. Conversions can be anything, like signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, booking a room, hiring a bike, opening an account or accessing more content on the website.
• Compelling use of negative space
• Choices, presented simply for the user (the fewer choices the user has, the less likely they are to become overwhelmed and confused)
• Calls to Action – clear and obvious calls to action
• Limited distractions and a well thought out user journey (ie. using only images and text that are 100% relevant to the subject on the page, featuring only buttons that lead to desired actions and using font variations for emphasis and calls to action, not just for the sake of featuring different fonts)
• Responsive design (a design that resizes and reorients itself to the user’s screen, making the website easy to use on any device: phone, tablet, laptop or desktop browser.
• Appropriately sized readable fonts that follow a hierarchy (see “Limited distractions”) on all devices
• Relevant, high-quality content and images that hook your readers’ attention
• A balance between the amount of text and images on each page (too much text can overwhelm a visitor, too little text can be equally disengaging)
Every design choice you make will affect your website’s usability and conversion rate in some way. All of them.
If you don’t think aesthetic design choices affect conversions, think again. Your website must be attractive — especially to your prospective user, so try to figure out what style is going to speak to them. Remember the ‘cardinal-sin’? Ask your customers what they think of your design and the user experience.
Invest in eye-catching images that work with your brand. Stay away from obvious stock photography.
If you are selling a product, then images of your products should be on every page especially the top banner slides. Anything else can be a distraction if there is no obvious link between your products and the image. If you want an image of your location or your shop, then the best place to put this is on your ABOUT US or CONTACT US or FIND US page and not on your Home Page and definitely not on your Product Pages.
Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, coined the phrase “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. This could not be more apt when it comes to design and websites.
ONLY restaurant in 3 miles you may go in. But studies show people are less likely to enter an empty establishment than a busy one! So try to make the images show your product or service is successful.
Remaining true to your brand is key to successful website design. Even the most gorgeous website is useless if it doesn’t match your brand or engage with customers.
Other building blocks of an effective web design are:
• Buttons
• Fonts
• Colour palette
• The visual balance between your images and copy on each page
Of course, good web design isn’t just utilitarian. Visitors like websites that are engaging and fit the brands’ aesthetics. No matter how you achieve it, meshing an on-brand, engaging look with design elements that convert is how you win at web design.
As a general rule, visitors shouldn’t have to do any work to use your website. The whole experience of using your website should be straightforward and intuitive.
Here are some examples: Clear calls to action are great web design; murky ones are bad web design. High contrast fonts are smart, effective web design; low contrast fonts that are hard to read are poor web design.
Here are a few other elements to avoid:
• Distracting images and backgrounds. As a general rule, stay away from tiled backgrounds. Though there are a few select instances where a tiled background could be a good choice, in most cases they’re distracting.
• Non-responsive design. Nowadays your website simply needs to be mobile responsive. All websites should look good and function well on mobile phones and tablet devices.
• Unclear links and buttons. Visitors shouldn’t have to hunt for links and buttons, they should be able to quickly see which images and pieces of text will take them to new pages or confirm their choices. Similarly, users should be able to clearly recognize fillable fields.
• Generic or irrelevant stock photos and filler text without valuable information.
Certain web design elements, like grid layouts, aren’t inherently good or bad choices. They can be used in effective and ineffective ways, so taking care to do them right is a must.
Another tricky web design element is animation. It’s not 1999 anymore, you shouldn’t have a comet tail trailing the user’s cursor or make them scroll past a row of dancing hamsters to get to your content. But an animated exit pop-up that brings visitors’ attention back to your site and gets them to convert? As long as you provide a simple choice that will not frustrate website visitors, then Yes!
There are a few different ways to get the website you need. The way that’s right for you and your company depends on how complex of a website you need, how much your budget is and how much of the work you can do yourself.
You can work directly with a web designer. Simply search the internet for good “Website Developers Near You” – always browser the website developer’s portfolios and clients and pick the designer you like best and who fits the style and look you’re going for.
Why choose a good website developer near you? Although website development can be done anywhere in the world. We have found that the best solutions are done by agencies or freelancers that know your both your local marketing and your international needs.
A website designer can customize an existing template or design a completely fresh template for your website. If you want your website built from scratch, you can work with a designer and developer who has the skills to make it happen.
If you need help coming up with ideas for your website design, how about hosting a design contest by providing a brief and having designers submit designs based on your specifications? Or just go ask three web designers to bid for the job, asking how long and how much they would charge.
Using a template-driven website builder (like Wix or Squarespace) is also an option. Although these are very limited in many ways and you’ll need to be more hands on. If you’re not a designer you will be limited to what these platforms offer, but you can always hire a designer to customize a template for you.
Be prepared to invest in high quality web design. Your web design could cost a few hundred to thousands of dollars, depending on its complexity. What you’ll spend is proportionate to what you need.
So how do you know if you need a custom-built website or if a template will do you just fine? That all depends on what you need your website to do and what you plan for it. If scaling is part of your business plan, get a custom website. If you need it to be search engine friendly, if you need to adapt it to various business needs, if you have very specific ideas about the website that demand that it be built to your specifications, you need a custom website. When these aren’t priorities for you and you don’t have a large budget, a customized template is the way to go.
See Simply IT’s example website fees below:
By taking a hands-on role in your website’s design process, you’ll guarantee that you’ll get a website that meets or exceeds your expectations.
Tell Simply IT website designers and website developers about your brand, your voice and what you plan to achieve with the website. The more information they have, the more equipped they are to deliver the perfect web design for you. Explain your vision to them and then let them work their magic!
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