How Important is (Web) Design’s Role?

In today’s information-filled world, it is equally important to have meaningful content on your website, as well as presenting it in an attractive and clear way. With design: choosing the correct colors, typefaces, and graphics can quickly differentiate you from your competition and represent your business image. These important decisions can bring out the “flavor” of your company and be the difference between high-end vs. cheaper.

Design plays an emotional role by creating a visual message and influencing the user. It also plays a pragmatic role by helping users easily locate and understand the message.

A web designer goes beyond the visual aspects of choosing colors and typesfaces. They must ensure that the site functions properly, graphics and images are optimized for the web to ensure faster loading time, content is broken up into keywords and headings, and styled to increase readability and assist search engines. They must also ensure that scripts and codes function properly on different browsers.

In the case of our own website redesign, we decided to update our look and feel and reorganize our information. After all, our website was going on six years, and in web years, much had happened in technology since then. We took advantage of this opportunity to ‘clean house’. Similar to cleaning out one’s garage, we went in and got rid of the clutter, the dead pages, the ‘dust’, and we came out with a more attractive, functional, and overall better website. In the meantime the redesign (and use of more up-to-date coding) brought us the added benefit of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The design played an important role in creating and enhancing our companies message. In my opinion, the new website better portrays our companies professional image. It’s easier to find information, the pages load faster, the graphics are more updated and contain important messages about our company and what we do.

The other advantage of our ‘cleaning house’ provided us with better SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Why? Our reorganization and rewording of content enabled us to get the message across clearer, using keywords, bullet points, internal links, and headings. This not only helps with Search Engines, but it breaks up the text and makes it easier to read.

In the end, we benefited from both sides: aesthetically and functionality-wise.