Custom Website Design

An overview of web design

There are differences between web design and web development. The major difference is that web development deals with the programming code that goes on behind the scenes, and creates the features that are seen by the end user (your customers).

Web design deals with the look and feel of the website. This is the aspect of the website that the customer gets to interact with. Web design is important as it directs your customers in terms of colours, graphics, navigation, product placements and so on. On top of this, the design allows the content to communicate your business message to your customers.

As such, your website needs to be more than just a company catalog. You need to communicate a number of other things to your customers:

Your brand – your website becomes your 24/7 sales force and spokesman. As such it needs to display your identity and unique selling proposition, so that customers keep coming back.

Your sales force – ecommerce lets you make sales at any time of the day or night. Besides making direct sales, you also need to use your website as a sales funnel, by getting subscribers to sign up to your mailing list.

Your marketing tool – great web design equals a powerful marketing tool. You need to direct the actions of your visitors, so that they take the actions that build your business. Your content should be persuasive and attention grabbing. Your content should also be optimised for the search engines in order to bring in lots of free traffic.

Your Support system – your website should offer support to your customers. You can do this in the form of frequently asked questions, contact forms and online support systems. Many questions can be answered on your website, in order to remove the burden from your staff.

Your message – you need to create and publish great content on your website. This is facilitated by the web design as you can create article sections, downloadable content, newsletters and membership options.

As you can see, great web design is much more than just having a “good looking” website. It contains the elements listed above.

What features are included in your web design?

• Coding (the basic building blocks of a secure, robust website)
• Search engine optimisation (within the design and content of the website)
• Content (the best placement of certain content for marketing reasons)
• Design (branding, usability, navigation, graphics, layout, structure, colour scheme)

All of the things mentioned above are important in great web design. The website needs to be attractive, but useable. It also needs to contain a powerful marketing message in order to bring customers into your funnel and consistently increase your sales.