Being a web designer, your responsibility doesn’t start and end with spectacular graphics and eye-catching designs. A web designer must take into account a lot more factors, other than the aesthetics. For example, you must contemplate the requisites like navigation, easy viewing, w3 standards, and the likes. More importantly, you need to keep the marketing and sales factors in mind, thanks to the recent flurry of Google updates and the fast changing trends in cyber world.
Keeping all these things in mind while designing a web page is what sets an ordinary web designer apart from a highly sought-after professional who gets away with the best available jobs.
Following are some important areas that you need to chew over as a web designer, a website with all these points taken care of will be of great help in terms of sales and marketing.
Bounce Rate:
Having a bounce rate on the higher side was never considered a good thing, but its significance has increased manifold after the Google Panda update. A website that doesn’t manage to hold its visitors for sufficient time is bound to slip down the ranks after some time. When it comes to retaining the visitors, it’s true that the content will play the most important role, but the first thing a visitor notices when he/she lands at a website is not the quality of the content, but the design and the overall look.
Even the most meaningful content will lose its worth when it is featured in the middle of unnecessary clutter. A good web designer should be able to come up with a design that gives the center stage to the main content and provides easy-viewing experience for the visitors, so that they will spend some time on the website.
Credibility:
Having a clean and professionally designed website will add to the trust and credibility, which is a big plus for businesses looking to sell online. This is why it is so important to have a highly responsive website, a website that doesn’t fell apart on different browsers (e.g. Firefox, IE, Chrome) or platforms (computers, smart phones, tablets, etc). Doesn’t matter how good is a design, but if it’s taking ages in loading, showing errors, or doesn’t respond in the desired way will fail to make an impression on the visitors.
Branding:
When you are designing website for a brand, you need to keep the brand in mind while choosing everything from colors to typography. Brand building requires a certain consistency in everything, including the logo, header, menu bar, headings, footer, social profiles, and the likes. Remember that brand is a lot more than just a logo and certain colors, every brand has its own character, a certain identity, and your web design should depict that character.
Social Media Integration:
There’s a lot to gain from having a good following at social networks for online businesses, and a web designer must keep the social factor in mind while designing website. Not only they should design customized Facebook or Twitter pages for businesses, but they should integrate social media buttons and icons in a way that will lure the users to click or have a look, instead of just fitting in a plug in with dozens of buttons that hardly get clicked.
Conversion:
For all kinds of websites, conversion is what really matters. And again, web designers can play an important role by designing the landing pages, or sales pages in a way that highlights the strong points of a website. The worst case is when a customer arrives with an intention to make a purchase, but gets irritated by poor navigation or any kind of clutter and leave. Being a web designer, you need to minimize the distractions and highlight the “call to action” in a way that entices customers instead of turning them off.
__
Rahil writes for treehouse, where you will find lots and lots of helpful material to learn web design or web development.
