5 Convincing Reasons Your Venture Needs New Web Design
This weeks post is brought to us by returning contributor Estelle Liotard: freelance writer, blogger and contributor at 3to5marketing.com.
Have you ever wondered why your visitors aren’t interacting with your website the way you were expecting them to? The answer may lie in the fact that you have an outdated website that fails to offer good user experience and to elicit certain responses and actions from your visitors.
Your website’s design is an essential part of your online presence and your digital marketing strategy. It is the thing that sets that first impression, builds trust with your audience, and gives you a competitive edge. An unresponsive, outdated or hard to navigate website will have you missing out on leads and send your customers right to your competitors’ pages. Here are 5 convincing reasons why you should consider a new web design for your site:
1. Your website doesn’t work well
The most obvious reason why your website might need a refresh is if it is not working well. Perhaps your website doesn’t offer the user experience your customers expect it to. Maybe it is too difficult to navigate or it is not optimized for today’s modern browsers. Either way, your online customers are very unlikely to return on your website if it doesn’t provide them with a good experience.
When accessing a website, users expect intuitive navigation, fast load speed, mobile responsiveness, and sleek design that reflects the brand and what it is offering. Chances are that you have visited thousands of websites up until now and you already know what you like or didn’t like about the overall user experience they offered. If you have visited a website but could barely find what you were looking for, you would probably hesitate to return to it. The same logic applies to your online customers if your website fails to help them discover your content or understand your offerings. Your prospective online customers will bounce off your site with a negative first impression and will most likely never return.
2. Your website is outdated
Web design has improved significantly, helping businesses to take engagement with their customers to a whole new level. The latest web design trends focus on offering a great user experience that translates into better conversion rates and increased sales.
Design is an essential part of making a website relevant and appealing to its visitors. It can play a considerable role in captivating visitors, engaging and encouraging them to spend more time on the site. Thus, if your website is a few years old, there's a good chance that it is long behind today's modern trends. The latest web design trends include:
Geometric shapes: Using geometric shapes is not necessarily a revolutionary trend in web design, but technological innovations have taken it to the next level. Today’s web designers can create in-depth, 3-dimensional elements that offer a unique user experience. Ben Ratcliff, a UX designer at IsAccurate, explains that “3-dimensional shapes can create a more realistic experience by creating a sense of realism that bridges the offline and the virtual world in the eyes of the visitors”.
Appealing colour palettes: The psychology of colour is one of the most critical principles in web design. It is well known that specific colours can give consumers certain emotions and moods that play a crucial role in their purchasing decisions. Using eye-catching colour palettes is a popular web design trend used to improve readability and the overall appeal of the site.
Storytelling through the website: Storytelling is paramount marketing and one of the most effective strategies to engage customers and create certain feelings toward your brand. It should come as no surprise that storytelling with narrative elements such as animation, second-person voice, or captivating diagrams have become a pervasive new trend.
Conversational interfaces: In today’s digital world, web design had to find a way to facilitate human-machine interaction to offer a better user experience. Conversational interface includes elements such as chatbots and voice assistants that aim to make the site easier to navigate by helping visitors with immediate responses to their questions.
Interactive elements: Asking visitors to answer questions, vote, leave a comment or skip an ad encourage visitors to take specific actions on the site which will engage them more and boost conversions.
White space: This is any area of the site that doesn’t contain any visual or text content to improve readability and usability of the interface and minimize distractions.
3. Your competitor’s website is better than yours
Start by assessing which of your competitors is stealing customers from you. Now take a look at their website and compare it with yours. Next, put yourself in the shoes of your online customers and decide which company would you go for based on what you are seeing.
You may not think that your website can play such a huge role in the consumers’ purchasing decisions. However, most of today’s consumers make online purchases on a daily basis. Your competitors might be winning at attracting and retaining customers simply because they offer a better user experience on their websites.
Consider redesigning your site to level the playing field and eliminate the competitive advantage your business rivals have over you.
4. Visuals dominate but text matters too
Visual marketing and web design go hand in hand in today's business landscape. Visual content in web design is paramount as it is the one that creates an engaging and appealing interface. Visual content design is a mixture of all visual elements that are published on your business site to drive traffic, raise awareness, or conversions.
All types of visual content integrated into the web design, be it images, geometric shapes, or interactive elements, aim to improve the user experience on your website. The human brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than written content. Thus, visual content can play a crucial role in marketing brands, ideas, or products. However, while visuals must dominate your design, the written content must be fluid with the message of the visuals as well.
If your website doesn't have a good content marketing strategy, you should consider developing one. A solid content marketing strategy can work wonders for building trust with your audience and increase the traffic to your site. Since the written content of your website is just as important as the aesthetics of the design, you need to provide your visitors with comprehensive and engaging text. Make sure to check your content for common grammar and spelling mistakes with tools such as Grammarly, GrabMyEssay, or Hemingway App. If you're ambitious, you can get your text checked by the professionals at WowGrade to get feedback on how to improve your written content.
5. Your website fails to reflect your brand
Business models, concepts and clientele can be refined over time for many reasons. However, often businesses forget about updating their website to reflect those changes in the digital world too.
If your brand value, services, or products have changed over time and your website fails to say that, you certainly need to consider a new web design that will reflect your new brand accurately. However, when redesigning your business site, for this reason, look for more than just updating your logo or changing the colors with the new pallet of your brand. You should also pay attention to the content of it and the overall look and feel that your visitors will experience. You can use a website builder such as Squarespace and try different templates and pick the one that suits your brand the most. Having a website design that truly reflects your brand is the first step into demonstrating authenticity to your online visitors.
Business models, concepts and clientele can be redefined over time for various reasons. However, often, businesses forget about updating their website to reflect those changes in the digital world.
If your brand values, services, or products have changed over time, and your website fails to reflect that accurately, you certainly need to consider a new design. However, when redesigning your business site, for this reason, look for more than just updating your logo or changing the colours with the new pallet of your brand. You should also pay attention to the content of it and the overall look and feel that your visitors will experience. Consider using a website builder such as Squarespace, try different templates and pick the one that suits your brand the most. Having a website design that truly reflects your brand is the first step into demonstrating authenticity to your online visitors.
A modern, intuitive, and engaging website is imperative to online business success. It can positively impact your audience's impression on your business, transform leads into sales, and build trust and customer loyalty. Make sure your website's design is always updated and offers a great user experience.
