The Importance of A Good Design

Your website is the front door and lobby of your online business; it is the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you are doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. You really only get to make a good first impression once. This is where a good webpage design comes in.

Imagine if you are running a local business which is offline. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff dress professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. How your website is designed tells how much you care for that customer and whether you can be trusted with their business.

If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute "quick fix", you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality. This has been the problem with inexperienced people creating their own web sites. While most pre-teens now "know how" to build a web site, only those who have really invested the time to build experience can routinely produce an improved website that meets professional standards.

On the other hand, where you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organised, focused and you really mean business. You are their to give them value and help them improve their lives. They can trust you.

A web design should integrate with the overall marketing strategy of your business. Your logo and building design should be reflected in elements of your website design. So when a customer goes to your website and later comes to do business with you, it all fits together and again improves their trust in you. For this reason one of the first questions we ask when working with a new client is a copy of their logo and corporate color scheme.

Now I have created sites and turned them over to the in-house staff to maintain, only to later find that these various "fixes" and "updates" were actual degrades to the site and made it look shabby and amateurish. If you are going to maintain your changes in-house, either keep the designer on a retainer to check in occasionally and "tweak" the changes back to the original design - or pay them to train your staff to do the changes within that design format.

Do your homework ahead of time and know what you want. Surf the Internet and discover for yourself what you most like in your favorite sites. While you want to know what your competitor is doing, don't feel limited to designs they may be using, especially if it's not your style. When you have this understanding securely under your belt, you are then able to talk to a designer and get your money's worth.