Sonam
Website Design: Expectations vs. Reality
By 2020, At this point, we are all aware that websites dominate the digital marketing world. Every reputable or successful business has a functional website that are necessary and beneficial for a multitude of reasons and the masses are now more familiar with this than ever before. However, when it comes to truly understanding and appreciating the topic of website design and development, there are many popular misconceptions. Here’s a quick dose of reality-check in response to some of the most common misjudgments:
1. Web Design isn’t easy. You shouldn’t let your next door neighbor to build your site.
Creativity and design skills are specialized talents that require a deep understanding of designing principles and technical knowledge. You wouldn’t hire a receptionist at the hospital to perform your surgery, so don’t recruit your next-door neighbor to design your website, even though he seems like a really smart guy. There are underlying strategies and methodology to “Why” and “How” a site is designed and laid out so having a strong understanding of user interface and back-end processes is crucial; not to mention that most non-designers won’t know how to foresee technical issues and proactively build a site to ensure it runs smoothly. Sometimes a simple update in WordPress can causes an entire site to crash. What will your next-door neighbor do then?
2. Website Launched ≠ Job Done
Just like buying a new bike, timely maintenance and updates are necessary on an ongoing basis for websites to continue to function optimally and stay up-to-date with changing web trends, standards, and browser compatibility advancements. Also, regular updates to your website help search engine rankings because it’s telling Google that your site is relevant and active. It’s also suggested that websites be redesigned about every 3-4 years.
Let’s look at some of our favorite techniques for creating a website redesign strategy and implementing it for maximum ROI.
“88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. (Source: The Gomez report, Why Web Performance Matters)”
3. Backend changes won’t impact site appearance! You will not compromise your site speed and SEO, Right?
Each change you make to your websites counts. Each change that you do on your site should be carefully done and make sure you know all the repercussions of a single change on your site before putting it on live. The images, content, animation, videos, plugins will impact the way that your site performs. Some plugins slow down your site speed, creates errors, and gives you false information. This affects the way Google crawls your site to optimize it to rank on the search engine. Every time the changes which you make on the site hurts SEO ranking and end-users get confused on your site. You can change a few things on your site when it’s live by removing few files to increase loading speed, change the content if necessary, or adding a new page.
4. You shouldn’t rely on Google for your website images.
Any business can have a website that is excellent and perfectly functional, but if it incorporates images with poor resolution or large in sizes, this can ruin an otherwise great site. It is absolutely crucial that websites only use the highest resolution and properly optimized images that contribute to your overall design. (preventing loading and performance issues).
Also, randomly plucking images on your website from the internet can put you at risk of Copywrite infringement. Don’t be scared to invest in good photographs! It makes a huge difference and uniquely stand-out in the market.
5. Be cautious of cheap or inexpensive web design prices.
Hope! You would heard the expression “you get what you pay for”. Of course, we all have, and it can’t be more true when it comes to your website. It can be appealing to hire a company or freelancer claiming to build a whole new site for 150 bucks, but believe us, that kind of price means far too few hours spent on your project – That means sacrificing some of the most important aspects of a website building process. Great web design demands countless hours of UI/UX designing, planning, testing, and fine-tuning.
If you think of it in terms of a standard hourly wage, you can understand how costs add up. Try to view web design in the same way as you would any other refined skill like (doctors, lawyers, plumbers…) and what most people are established to paying for these types of professionals and their hours of work. It makes more sense to understand the cost of website design when you are looking at it from the perspective of time, creativity and energy spent, rather than a finished project.
Final Thought
Designing a website comes down to putting in the research to fully understanding and the list of pros and cons in building it. Building a website on your for personal use or blogging is ok but when it comes to the business you should take the right decision by thinking about the time and money. It’s never too late to the advantage of the resource out to find web developers. We THE DEVELOPER MODE, are always there to build the website for your business and meet the expectation.
