Unless you’ve taken a business or web design course, there aren’t many instances where you would learn why you need a well-designed website for your business or how to design it well. We’ve had many clients who didn’t know what a well-designed website looked like or why it was so important to have one. When we explained all the benefits they were missing out on and the way they were hurting themselves, they were shocked, to say the least.
Not everyone knows the importance of having a well-designed website, but once we clarify, it may be like a light bulb went off in your head.
A Website May Be Someone’s First Impression of Your Business
When you don’t have a physical storefront, the only other way someone will interact with your business before your website is through an ad, which will take them to your website. People are constantly searching for things on their phones, and with how easy it is, people can figure out whether or not you’re a business worth visiting without stepping foot in your store.
When a website isn’t well-designed, people bounce. The average time people spend on a website is 15 to 45 seconds. This isn’t the time they spend on a web page, but all the time they spend on an entire website on average. People’s attention spans are small, and if your first impression isn’t good enough, they’re gone.
While many people may not be able to explain what a good website is, they can spot a bad one immediately. Your website needs to be intuitive, attractive, clear, and provide something of worth. Never let your first impression be your last with a potential customer.
A Well-Designed Website Attracts More Visitors
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is something we talk about all the time. It’s the system that decides what shows up on the first page of online search results when people look up anything. Search engines like Google and Bing all have specific criteria that they look for, but they also have many things in common. For one, they mainly search for the safest and most well-crafted websites out there.
Their algorithms go through websites regularly to index them and find out if a website meets their criteria. A poorly designed website will take longer to crawl and index. It’s common for web pages and posts to be missed because the website wasn’t properly designed. When this happens, search engines take note and push poorly designed websites less often, if at all.
This means having a poorly designed website leads to poor SEO, fewer website visitors, fewer clients, and overall, less profit.
A Well-Designed Website Captures More Leads, Sales, and More
All marketing efforts should be focused on a goal, and your web pages are no different. Each web page should be trying to do things like:
- Inform the visitor as to who your business is and what products/services you provide
- How your product or service improves someone’s life
- What kind of people need your product or service
- Where/how someone can access your product or service
- Enable them to give you their information or make a purchase
Good web pages do one of these things really well. The best can achieve multiple goals at once. If your website has multiple pages and posts that don’t do any of these things or don’t collectively do these things often, you have a poorly designed website, and it’s doing little for you.
A well-designed website is how you can get the contact information and money of the people who visit your website. Most people are not going to do business through your website if it’s clunky, difficult to navigate, and impossible to trust. You have to pay money to maintain a website, and if it’s not capturing leads or sales, it is wasting money.
Is it Better to Have a Poorly Designed Website or No Website?
The answer to this question is complicated. It depends on how bad your website’s online experience is, how many competitors you have, and how your business makes money.
If your business is consumer-facing, rarely struggles to make ends meet, and doesn’t have many local competitors, no website may be better than a poor one. In this instance, you’re wasting money to maintain a website that is hurting your reputation and costing you money. It would be better to work on a good website. An example of this would be a grocery store looking to raise its already successful profit margins. It offers necessities, and if there’s no major competitor, it’s going to run out of business. Saving up and making sure the website is optimized before it goes up is the way to go.
But a business with multiple competitors targeting the same keywords cannot afford to go without a website. You need to have a website to make sure your competitors don’t show up when people search for your business’s name. In this case, a poorly designed website is better than nothing at all.
ENX2 Marketing Can Make You the Website You Need
Quality web design is integral to the success of many businesses in our online world. Even businesses that serve necessities require some kind of online presence to live up to customer expectations. Don’t settle for the bare minimum when ENX2 Marketing can help you exceed your competitors. For the website you need, contact ENX2 Marketing today.
