7 Benefits of Having a Professional Website Design
CEO’s don’t dress like they’re homeless and wine tasting events are generally never held in the back of a liquor store. There’s a good reason behind this. People generally do not follow the “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” motto, so the very first thing they do is, you guessed it, judge your book by it’s cover. The same is true for website designs -people visit your site and immediately make a decision on if it’s a place they’re going to spend time (and money) at, or if they’re going to lump you in with the millions of other sites that look just like yours and move on to something else.
As you can see, the benefits of having a professional design can be great, especially if your website is geared towards building your business. Outlined in this post are 7 different reasons why it’s beneficial to have a professional web design.
1. Added exposure through CSS galleries
One of the benefits of having a professional design created is that you’re able to submit the website to galleries around the web and have it showcased to audiences that you would have otherwise never been in front of. This brings in added traffic, potential clients and also adds to your authority by being talked about across the web and showcased as a professional website.
2. Your first impressions do count
Like I discussed in the beginning of this article, your first impression made is an important one – and a professional website design is definitely going to leave a better first impression that one that looks as if it was put together by your cousins neighbor who is 12 and just got his first PC.
3. Highlight your expertise with ease
With a professional website design, you’re able to showcase the things you do best – if you’re a designer, the design itself showcases your skills and if you’re a writer, you’re able to utilize a great design to highlight areas you excel at – maybe setting up a call to action box integrated into the design that lets people know what you do and how they can hire you. This would be much better than just having a site slopped together with no real direction.
4. Better design + more eyes = More sales
With your killer design, you’re attracting visitors from all over the web – they want to sit & stare at the beautiful website design you’ve got on display and then, out of nowhere, they’re going to get the urge to pull their credit card out of their pockets and buy tons of products from you. Well, it might not happen exactly like that, but a good design that brings in more visitors is definitely going to have some of that trickle into your sales.
5. Less bugs and cross browser compatibility
If you hire someone who is great with IE6 but has yet to hear about the fact that IE7 and IE8 are out, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all web browsers and they’re severely behind the times, how do you expect them to make sure that your website is accessible to the visitors of your site? A professional web designer will ensure that your website is clearly viewable on all major browsers, thus giving you the ability to keep your professional appearance up in front of everyone viewing your site, even those who are viewing in the less-than-popular browsers (IE6).
6. Reduce your maintenance time greatly
With a professional website design, the time you actually have to spend cleaning things up and making sure everything is up to day drops drastically, giving you more time to focus on the things that matter most – traffic, sales and increased visibility. The majority of the time, your design will not even have to be touched for a year or two – until you’re ready for an updated look, at which time you can contact your original designer to give you a face lift, keeping your hands free to, again, make more sales and run your business.
7. Increased search engine visibility
Some people may not believe it, but the benefits of a professional web design also trickle into your search engine rankings and visibility. For starters, a professional web designer will ensure the code markup is clean and easy to read – great for spiders who crawl your page. The other increase of search visibility comes from all of those links and the added exposure your website design gets across the web – design blogs regularly feature the awesome designs they find across the web and the new clients you bring in will feature a link back to your site at the bottom of their site, increasing your back links (this is something you’d have to make sure your clients are OK with – I know from my business that 9 times out of 10 they’re fine with it).
What benefits do you see?
Take a second and leave us a comment letting everyone know what benefits you reap from having a professional website design. After all, MyInkBlog readers are some of the most creative people out there, so I know there are some gems of wisdom you can share ;)
If this post was helpful to you, please consider sharing it with others, it's a great way of saying thanks.
CONTRIBUTE
J at emilie inc
May 3, 2010
Couldn’t agree more! Our site gets ton of SEO traffic and has people staying an average of 5 1/2 minutes! The design is clean and for us all about the product…our images. The video content on our Studio and Client Testimonials pages gets great comments from our visitors.
We have never had a issue with someone not being able to see our site, images or information! The two things that you are missing in the post, would be that you are easily able to update the content on a regular basis and to measure your results! Without measuring it is hard to know if something you did has been effective.
Kliky
May 3, 2010
#8 Leveraging the vast amount of quality resources there are for today’s open source projects, ie. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc.. You get a great CMS and once installed an extremely extensible Web site. You can continue plugging things in well after the re-design. A professional Web site design(er) will help you navigate these resources. I know, because this is what I’ve been doing for clients.
Joe Valdez
May 3, 2010
I am a firm believer in first impressions, I can be spokesperson for number 2 on this list. The other items are also very important and need to be thought about whenever developing a website.
sean
May 3, 2010
I’ve been a subscriber to your blog even though i don’t do web design..
I do graphics..
BUT – i would love to start outsourcing web design work
(I’m asked all the time if i do webdesign)
any suggestions?
Marcell Purham
May 3, 2010
Your best bet is to find work in your area or city because that is where all the jobs are. I have found more work locally then on the internet! Just a tip for ya :)
Marcell Purham
May 3, 2010
I think a professional web design is the way to go. Most people now days claim that they do not have the budget and often go with a template. I think templates are great if you are wanting to be like someone else. With a professional web design you’re getting something totally unique and built the way you would like it. Also your site will stand out if it looks like no other site :)
BECAS MEC Nueva York
May 4, 2010
HI Buddy!!!
You mentioned all above website maintenance for web designer & developer…tips so important and use full to me more..meet again.
Shane Jeffers
May 4, 2010
Great article Mike!
This is so true and sadly where many small to medium businesses fail to realize.
Shane
Web Design Maidstone
May 4, 2010
Nice article, whole heartedly agree… being a web designer!
Mike Smith
May 4, 2010
Wow. thanks for the comments everyone. I really appreciate you taking the time to comment on the article and to tweet/stumble/digg it :)
@Marcell – I agree that local work can be done and done well, but don’t overlook finding work online. I find 99.9% of my work online, so it’s definitely an avenue to keep open.
e11world
May 4, 2010
#4 is probably my favorite point here. Great article!
David Coe
May 5, 2010
Great job Mike! When your talking with a client it can sometimes be difficult to explain both arguments (great design and great development) for each and every project.
keychains
May 5, 2010
4. Better design + more eyes = More sales
exciting and inspirer !
Website Design Bristol
May 5, 2010
Agreed! But I’m on the verge of stopping the support of IE6. There are some great jQuery browser upgrades to force viewers to upgrade.
Everything else is spot on though.
Matty
May 5, 2010
I think the cross browser benefit is certainly worth spending the extra cash for as it is so annoying to land on a site that does not load up properly and certainly losses respect and trust from potential customers. Great article.
Rachel
May 5, 2010
Excellent article..really inspiring..completely agree with your points..thanks for post…
Mario S. Cisneros
May 5, 2010
Good read Mike.
I tell prospective clients that their competitors are just one-click away and a professionally crafted Web site will not only help improve their SEO, but provides an unique and custom Web presence that lends credibility as well.
-MC
Go4webapps
May 6, 2010
great,,, now am thinking to redesign my site and ill make benefit of all these
vinay
May 6, 2010
very helpful..
Web Design Manchester - Andy Kinsey Designs
May 6, 2010
I couldn’t have put these points better myself – trying to explain to clients about professional vs amateur design is impossible … pretty much the same reason I wrote about “content is easy” last night @ http://seoandy.com/great-content
SJL Website Design
May 6, 2010
Great post, all these points are so true. If only everyone knew the benefits of professional web design.
Thanks for sharing.
Damian Smith
May 6, 2010
Great article Mike, made for good reading away from a busy schedule!
I totally agree with all the points, you always find when looking for certain trades/places on the web, that if you stumble across a poor designed website 90% of people wouldn’t even give it a chance by “reading the book”.
Having a DIY website or a novice do one cheap for you is all well and good money wise, but is it really? You spend a little cash on a poor/bland website thinking you save money but then you get no enquiries from it and you seem to be appearing nowhere in search engines = no business (no money).
But… If they were to have a pro (like myself :p) design and build a site, then people will hopefully want to look through the site and click on that stylish “submit my enquiry” button. They may even hopefully find you on page one of Google!
BebopDesigner
May 6, 2010
Brilliant article! This is great support material to educate / persuade clients!
Thanks for sharing
Mike
May 6, 2010
Professional work is always great and it can be not in this niche, it applies to every topic or niche like SEO, Marketing, PPC, Programming etc…nice article
Web design France
May 10, 2010
I think you have covered the reasons for getting a professional website design pretty thoroughly. Picking up on the search engine ranking point, its also worth noting that Google have started to include load speed as part of the Page Ranking criteria. You see so many sites that load really slowly because they haven’t been optimized properly. A professional website designer would never allow that to happen.
Btscene
May 12, 2010
Great article,covered all aspects of webdesign advantages.The most critical IMO is as you mention trust.Trust lead to sales and sales push a site to success.
Collene Cradler
May 12, 2010
Very interesting blog post thank you for writing it I have added your site to my favorites and will be back :) By the way this is off topic but I really like your web page layout.
soegemaskineoptimering
June 12, 2010
Hi, I think your blog is very interesting. I found it via Bing. Will definitely come back again
Jake Linear
June 14, 2010
That’s a good read. I will be visiting again to see what else is new. Keep it up
magnet link
June 17, 2010
When your talking with a client it can sometimes be difficult to explain both arguments, keep walking.
How to Handle Stress
June 30, 2010
Wonderful post – I was thinking about an article on a related subject that I need to take a shot at, but from a slightly different angle. Thanks for sharing this with the rest of the world…Obviously a lot of people appreciate it too!
Web Design Sheffield
September 6, 2010
Selling good web design to clients is one of the hardest things to do in many cases (depending on the particular clients’ knowledge of the industry. Many clients really don’t see the financial rewards of perhaps paying a little more to get a better and more experienced web development company to build their site. Joining the dots between ROI and good web design is one of the most important stages of the client-designer relationship!
DotPeak Web Design
September 10, 2010
Good Points,
From experience I can tell that these points are so true. One thing that I noticed, if a website has a good design then people would remember it longer as well and also they would easily relate it to something – for example oh this is the website that looks like a desk.
Grover Geisinsky
September 22, 2010
Wow, that was an amazing article! Thanks so much for your fantastic writing, i’ve bookmarked your site so I can stay up to date with your stuff.
Rhonda Brown
October 18, 2010
Good points were made! It is hard sometimes to stress to people how important it is to use a graphic designer. I feel these points conveyed the message well.
The Web Division
November 4, 2010
You got it right! No doubts
We got to educate people.
Cheers
Appartamenti in Affitto Bucarest
November 15, 2010
Nice post, I totally agree with you. But choosing the right web designer is also important.
William Fay
November 26, 2010
I tend to agree with most of what you’ve said here. Though since there is some vagueness to the complexity of the “design” it makes me wonder. I’ve always been the type to make clean designs that ooze usability. While I think a good design is essential, I also believe great content is the most essential factor behind a site that CONVERTS.
To read more web site how-tos head over to my site at http://www.williamfay.net
William
Will Boling
December 7, 2010
Great list! I haven’t so much thought of the first one, but it makes perfect sense!! Thanks for the post!
Wild Griffin Media
December 30, 2010
This post was great. It has a lot of good information. Thanks!
Wes Wilson | Upstack
January 9, 2011
A well-written argument for spending the extra money for a professional design. These days it’s not the number of visitors that matter but the conversion rate of how many visit and actually stay (and make a purchase) on your site. A professional website gives you an edge almost immediately over competitors with less than stellar sites.
Orfebreria
March 2, 2011
While I think a good design is essential, I also believe great content is the most essential factor behind a site!!
magento webwinkel
March 7, 2011
A professional webdesign is the best investment you can do! It will raise your conversion so customers will buy more and more from you.
steve
March 21, 2011
Having a website will help you to get more customers in comparison to your competitors because these days customers have options in the market. If they find someone with attractive and professional website which attracts them only then, they will love to do business with that person. That s why it all depends on how you ll present your business among your customers and website is the best way to do that.
For Example- If you are in for shopping to buy a product, you see two different shops selling same product just next to each other. One is full of lights and well decorated where in another one is dull and without any decoration so you ll definitely visit the shop which is more attractive.
Thus, increases the possibility of having a sale.
Paul
March 29, 2011
I’ve struggled with what to do on somewhat of a shoestring budget. I used headway theme to customize my site, but visual creativity is not my strong point.
I guess I’ll just have to turn up the cash and look into getting it professionally done. It looks like I’m missing out on too much by not doing so.
I’m going to have to agree with Orfebreria too… without great content , you have nothing though.
Paul
Webmaster, Home Theater Hack
Eve Halliman
April 10, 2011
WOW!nice post.keep up the good job.Music is my blood!
Jaclyn Krus
May 31, 2011
I completely agree with this post! Most of all I think #2 is the primary reason a business should professionals for design. There have been so many times when I’ve seen the website of a business and decided not to go there because of its failure to attract.