If Your Website Falls, Does Anyone Hear It?
Your website is your storefront, your brochure and your digital handshake. A website can make a good company look great or a great company look just OK. When creating your website, make sure you’re hiring one of the best web design firms by looking for these traits.
Responsive Web Design
If you only insist on one thing, make sure it’s responsive web design. With RWD, your webpage will look just as awesome on a smartphone or a tablet as it does on a PC. Walker Sands Digital reports that one-third of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices — up 73 percent from last year and 244 percent from 2011. The best web design firms understand that the world has gone mobile.
Search Engine Optimization
If you have a website about trees falling in the woods, but no one can find it, did you hire one of the best web design firms? The answer is no.
Search-engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of using links, content, metadata and keywords to optimize web pages so that they appear at or near the top of major search engines results. In a Cornell University study, 56 percent of users clicked the first result on a search page, 13 percent clicked the second, and virtually no one clicked anything after that.
When was the last time you clicked anything on page four of Google? Yeah, me neither. Make sure your web design firm implements an SEO strategy.
Aiming too Low
One trademark of the best web design firms is that their sites are neither too basic nor too complicated. A bare-bones site with the flair and panache of an oil painting is great — if you’re hoarding canned soup in preparation for Y2K. Yes, Craigslist and the Drudge Report look almost exactly as they did in 1998 and they’re among the most popular sites in the world, but in reality, retro bland looks cheap and amateurish. And sure the template websites are a starting point due to costs, but they are extremely limited in the ability to scale and will NOT give you a competitive edge.
Too Complex
Another trademark of the best web design firms is that their sites are clean, user-friendly, simple, and uncomplicated. If it’s harder to find your way around your website than it is to navigate the hedge maze at the end of “The Shining,” your visitors will be someone else’s visitors faster than you can say “less is more.”
The best web design firms not only create awesome sites, but ensure their compatibility across many devices and work to get your site ranked higher on search engines. Make sure they understand you, your needs and your intentions, and always shoot for a blend of pleasing aesthetics and real-world functionality.