Effective Web Design Is All About Balancing Aesthetics With SEO and Business
The internet has thrown up immense possibilities for business development, but it can often be a challenging task for entrepreneurs and business owners to take its advantage. Difficulties arise in gaining high visibility by cutting through the intense competition in the over-crowded virtual business space. Today, having an online presence is a basic requirement for businesses regardless of whether the operations are online or offline. However, just having a digital presence does not help much unless marketers can capitalize on the opportunity and successfully win the hearts of consumers and clients. The only way of winning the confidence of consumers is to captivate them with a well-designed fully functional and optimized website that can keep viewers closely engaged by making the browsing experience most memorable. Although marketers are aware of it, the sad thing is that numerous websites on the internet feature poor design.
Marketers and business owners whether in Las Vegas or anywhere else must make serious efforts to break away from the trend of creating mediocre or poorly designed websites to ensure that they create highly effective and fully functional sites to reap the benefits of online marketing. The design must blend aesthetics and functionality in proper measure, with the latter being more important because it helps to achieve the business goals. While the aesthetics of websites create the initial attraction, the business operations rely on the functional features of the site. Web designers must be aware of the business requirements and know the tricks of incorporating suitable functionalities in the design that helps to carry out the business operations effortlessly. But before it happens, the looks of the website must create the initial attraction that generates interest among viewers and encourages them to explore further thereby keeping them engaged.
Web design impacts SEO
Every business owner wants to monetize the online business opportunities by using websites and web developers. Designers must help them realize their goals by creating highly attractive and functional sites. The web design must have superior technical features duly supported by well structured and valuable content. The website design influences SEO that provides the plank for conducting business online. Doing good SEO must be the goal of any web design because online business success depends on how well the site ranks in search results. The technical features of the site should be at par with the best in the industry so that it ensures satisfactory crawling by the website spiders or bots of search engines.
The layout of the web design determines how smoothly the spiders can crawl across the site which in turn influences how well the search engines index the web pages. Good crawling leads to proper and speedy indexing of web pages that helps websites rank higher in search results. Naturally, it facilitates higher visibility as search engines would pick up the site ahead of others against search queries.
What leads to poor web design
It is a matter of concern that despite most marketers and web developers being somewhat aware of the impact of web design on SEO and how it determines the business fortunes, fail to keep away from poorly designed websites. Both marketers, who are often clients of SEO companies like BigDropInc.com as well as web developers and designers are responsible for the continuing trend of poor web design. Both parties are failing to play their roles properly which leads to unwanted compromises that affect that website quality which in turn has an adverse effect on business. Let us now look at the roles of marketers and web developers more closely to understand how they contribute to the mess.
Unrealistic expectations of marketers
Many marketers have poor or limited knowledge about how websites can work for business, what are its functional requirements and what it should deliver. Little do they know about how much it is necessary to look beyond website aesthetics because they have the wrong notion that creating a beautiful website is the end of marketing. Looks alone can do nothing to gain mileage in business. Websites can be useful for business only when it offers an engaging and fulfilling user experience. Graphics are important for websites as it is integral to the design process. However, to make sites useful for business, you must optimize it by looking beyond astounding graphics. To create magical websites that can drive the company towards the desired goals, web developers must work for building attractive sites that are highly functional and sophisticated too.
In addition, business owners often want to get maximum returns from least investment during website creation which becomes a major impediment for optimal website performance. Remember that you get what you pay for. It needs some good investment to create an effective website design that is also intuitive.
Developers are also to blame
It will be wrong to put the entire blame on marketers and business owners for contributing to poor quality website creation because web developers too falter in delivering quality websites. They must take some of the blame for creating sub-par websites that might look good but not good for business. For poorly designed and ineffective websites, web developers must be honest to admit the limitations that prevent them from creating highly functional and attractive sites. It is essential to understand the business process first and then incorporate the desired functionalities into the web design that keeps the business moving in the right direction. However, due to the short-sightedness of web developers or their inability to realize the business needs, they often tend to skip some of the essential features that could strengthen the business orientation of websites.
Going forward, it is the time to create multi-dimensional and fully functional websites that support the business requirements without any compromise. Since every business has unique needs, web developers must have a good grasp of the business processes so that they know precisely what functionalities to incorporate in the design to support it fully.
Let us now explore how web developers can incorporate the desired digital functionalities in the web design that aligns with the best practices of the industry.
SEO oriented navigation
Smooth navigation of websites ensures that users are happy to move across the site with ease and so also the search spiders. It ensures satisfying user experience and gives a boost to the SEO prospects, both of which are critical for providing better marketing results. When the search spiders can crawl across the website to access all web pages and every nook and corner of the site it ensures proper indexing of all content. Indexing ensures that search engines can pick up the web page quickly against search queries and present it in the search results thereby enhancing website visibility. Unsatisfactory navigation can result in improper crawling and partial indexing of content that affects the ranking prospects negatively.
From the users’ perspective, smooth navigation encourages them to explore the website to the fullest thereby enhancing engagement and reducing bounce rate. Search engines pick up the signals and consider it as signs of a good website that qualifies for higher ranking in search results. Remember that the navigation must be good for users as well as search engines. Avoid the lure of using Flash navigation and JavaScript which works well for facilitating user navigation but is not compatible with search spiders.
Avoid graphic intensive design
Graphic design provides the structure or architecture of websites on which you must implant the functional features and make it work smoothly in unison with the design elements. There must be a right balance in the proportion of graphic design and the functional elements so that there are no conflicts between the two. The graphical elements lend the aesthetic qualities to websites and doing too much of it can hinder the functional aspects. This can be quite damaging for SEO and defeat the purpose of using websites for business. Too much graphics come in the way of optimizing websites for SEO. The worse can happen when you immerse text into the graphics because the search engine spiders do not crawl it and thus the content escapes indexing. Effectively, the web page loses ranking opportunities which is a big blow for SEO.
While it is best to avoid too much graphics in web design if you must do it for whatever reason then it is better to create an HTML website for users together with a graphics intensive of Flash website which is like getting the best of both worlds. Such sites can rank well and enhance the SEO prospects thereby supporting the business well.
Size of website
Any SEO expert would advise its clients to pay attention to the size of the website. The website should be optimal in size, meaning that it should neither run into too many pages nor be just a scanty one or two-page website. The website size matters a lot because it impacts ranking in search results. When deciding on the right size of the website, you must not restrict it too much so that the content does not fit into it. Since content is equally important for ranking, you must ensure that the website has enough pages to accommodate the complete content. Truncated content affects search rankings, and you must avoid it at all cost. Balancing the content with the web design depends on the skills of web designers.
HTML coding
Search rankings not only depend on how well you optimize the website but also on the HTML codes used on the website that must be clean and efficiently written. You must optimize the HTML codes too, to improve the chances of higher rankings. There must be a relation between the lines of code and the content because it helps to improve rankings. To reduce the text formatting in relation to HTML code, it is advisable to use CSS for page styling. Improper use of Meta tags, heading, and alt, too many hyperlinks, excessive use of bold and italicized texts all can prove detrimental for search rankings, and you must be careful about it.
Responsive web design
The website design must display on small screens of mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, etc. in the same way as it does on bigger screens for which you must follow the best practice of the industry and adapt the responsive design for the website. The design elements adjust automatically according to the screen size so that it displays correctly without affecting user experience. Since almost everyone is using mobile devices nowadays to access the internet, creating mobile-friendly websites ensure that you can reach out to the largest section of consumers.
Besides, Google rewards mobile-friendly websites with a higher ranking which makes it even more critical to ensure that your site is mobile friendly. Such is Google’s liking for a mobile-friendly website that it is now ready to introduce mobile-first indexing meaning that the mobile version of sites will come up for indexing first, ahead of desktops and laptops.
Better search rankings and wider outreach are the gains from responsive web design that has become the default choice for web developers.
Speedy website
Optimizing the design elements ensures that it never becomes an impediment for website speed. Image heavy designs tend to slow down websites, and you must ensure that you use optimized images only that occupies less space and helps quick opening of web pages. Everyone wants sites to open as quickly as possible, preferably within 2-3 seconds and delay in page opening can frustrate users and drive them away immediately thereby increasing the bounce rate and damaging the prospects of earning high ranks in search results. Poor user experience can cause immense harm to the marketing prospects. Moreover, Google has announced that website speed is now a ranking factor, which gives more reason to focus on design elements that help to make fast websites even speedier. Use Google Insights to determine the current website speed, identify the bottlenecks that affect the speed and take measures to remove it so that the website becomes faster.
Designing websites that provide the best experience to users and are friendly to search engines are the only way to realize the business goals by using SEO effectively.