Web Design Tips: It’s Not About Looking Cool to Your Pals

A website is a basic business requirement. Second only to establishing your brand, creating your website is the most important task you must accomplish when starting a business.

What bothers me the most is that most smart business owners blindly turn to a graphic designer or web designer to design them a site that makes them “look cool” to their competitors.

Here’s the problem with that approach: Your competitors aren’t going to buy from you or hire you.

Website design isn’t about your designer adding another edgy piece to their portfolio that pushes the boundaries and makes them look cool to other designers.

Website design isn’t about using all of the programming tricks and capabilities available. Remember, custom animation was popular in PowerPoint when it first came out, but now you’re sort of a dork if you use it. Some of those website features work the same way.

Website design also isn’t about jockeying for the coolest site award among your peers. This isn’t high school and no one cares what stickers you have on your binder or what patches you have on your backpack.

What people do care about is that they can find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. It also helps if your website isn’t ugly and doesn’t look like your “friend’s husband who is good with computers” built it for you.

With that said, here is what designing your website should be about:

Your business website has nothing to do with your competitors. It’s sole focus is your target market and serving them to the absolute best of your ability. It should focus on providing useful, valuable information quickly. Your content should be easy to find and should take as few clicks as possible to reach it.

The website development should include the integration of automation tools that make your job easier, make the visitors’ experience better, and streamline your processes.

The web design should focus on organizing and presenting the information clearly. It should make the content easy to read and should guide the user through the site. The design should also help reinforce and enhance your brand, position you as an expert, and build your credibility.

Think of your website this way – the website is the movie, the content is the leading actor, and the design is the supporting actor.

Your goal is to create a synergy between the overall site, the design, and the content that helps create chemistry with your visitors so they keep coming back.