Attracting new customers and driving profits are every company’s primary goals, mainly for-profit businesses. With the current competition level, it becomes harder to stay relevant to the market, so it is critical to ensure its online presence. This is when having a dedicated web designer on your team can be very helpful. If you want to know how this specialist can improve your business – read on.
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Web Design and Its Value to the Modern Business
When we think about the online presence of a business, we don’t usually mean just social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn. The first thing that comes to everybody’s mind is a website. If you are a business owner and want your target audience to feel confident about your brand, building a high-quality website should be on the list of your top priorities.
Even if the budget is tight, start with a landing page that tells your story: what you would like to achieve with your offering; what kind of value you bring; and what’s more important – how to get in touch with you. And start using it. But keep in mind that a website is a powerful tool in shaping customers’ first impressions regarding your organization.
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The first impression must be concrete and compelling, right?
We tend to judge companies by the looks of their website within just a few seconds after landing there. If the website doesn’t look sharp, is not eye-catching, or lacks some technical update, you lose your chances of attracting new clients as such experience is nothing but discouragement. As a result, your direct competition, which has a better website, will get all your valuable leads and convert them into real business opportunities.
Every business is different. Each will gain something different from having an eye-catching website: from as simple as having more information accessible for end-users online to driving profit with ads and SEO traffic.
It is a fact that web design influences how search engine spiders will index your website after crawling the pages. Mastering SEO as part of designing a website is subject to no discussion. In other words, the website’s code has to be SEO-friendly or built by a pro web designer.
You need to think about the website as a digital identity or even the face of your company. It is the first thing that the potential buyer will see, and sometimes even decide based on it.
Imagine if someone walked into your headquarters. Would you not care about the way it looks and tells about you? It’s highly doubtful that an entrepreneur will not care about the customers’ journey. An updated, user-friendly, and accessible from any device website should be treated as an equivalent of a smiling receptionist at the front desk of your office, greeting your customers and prospects. Simply put, they will trust your business and feel comfortable checking it out further.
If those reasons are not enough for you to start looking for a dedicated web designer and the cost, here’s a big one. Your competitors are already in touch with web design studios or branding agencies that help create a unique user experience and online image of their companies.
If you have an outdated website that hasn’t been reworked since 2010 (yikes), you’re missing out on the opportunity to stand out from the competition. You want to remain relevant, fresh, and catchy, and deliver your message to a broader targeted audience? Invest in an opportunity to set your business apart.
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You Need a Web Designer – Here’s Why
A website is a way to send a consistent message about your brand across many different channels. Every company has a logo, a color scheme, and a specific identity. The website should be aligned with all the elements of your brand identity. Have an appropriate color pallet that is either your corporate color or triggers specific emotional associations like a feeling of trust, happiness, joy, or a sense of seemingly high quality.
The layout is as important as the color scheme. As a criterion, you want your setup to be clean, simple, and designed in a way that draws attention to certain things you want to emphasize. The ultimate goal of a visitor is to navigate and find the information they are looking for quickly, if not instantly. And, your web designer, a mobile website designer, for example, should think about ways of making that process more manageable and help visitors navigate your website.
When building a website, consider hiring someone who has experience building responsive, cross-platform website designs. Modern society spends a lot of time with their smartphones in hand. After all, it’s a quick and efficient way to surf the web and get nearly the same user experience as using a computer.
A mobile-friendly website should display correctly on smaller screens, such as iPhone or Android smartphones. An experienced, qualified web designer is one that could make both desktop and mobile versions of the website. Well-rounded UX is key, regardless of the type of device people use to get to your page, and impacts the mentioned indexing in search engines.
Great Website Design Examples
Slack
As a brand, Slack is known for its vivid illustrations and tons of colorful graphics, which have been a part of its identity since the early days. The most recent website doesn’t have many pictures, but it still has a ton of eye-catching details. It is also clear what their vital part is and how the app helps professionals and worldwide teams connect in the modern work-from-home era.
Dropbox
Here’s yet another excellent example of a website built by people for people. It tells the story of the company and infuse a feeling of appreciation and care about their customers. Dropbox has been changing their logos and color schemes quite a few times, but the most recent one sure is the best one yet. Besides, look at how easy it is to navigate to the desired page. There are only 4 “buttons” to press, so you can’t mess up at this stage. A great example and kudos to Dropbox.
StudioPress
Yes, this is another example where we have an almost cartoony design. It does the trick of keeping the website visitors a bit longer on the home page since you would be examining those catchy flat images to find all the details. It’s a good trick, and it looks like a lot of companies use it to their advantage. The three CTAs also help you to choose based on how you want to proceed.
Spotify
Speaking of the bright color spectrum, Spotify sure knows how to be bold! When you open their home page, you get knocked by a seemingly unmatching color palette that works like a magnet. The music industry giant is known for its fantastic combination of beautiful designs and user-friendly apps. The same applies to the website they have built. Listening is everything, but so is a great website.
A Web Designer Cost Comparison
Hiring someone who can get the job done with world-class quality can be quite expensive. Of course, there are plenty of freelance options, but it is hard to find a legit UX/UI professional who will be dedicated to you 100% and immediately react to your feedback. Sometimes time is the essence, so risking not having the website done by a product launch date, for example, is not worth it as it affects all departments of your company.
Now, when it comes to salary ranges, the numbers are very different. Such things as designer’s location, years of experience, the portfolio can quickly round your check to up to $80,000 per year if you’re looking for US-based web designers. Let’s break it down a little.
According to PayScale, a data company which helps companies manage employee compensation, web designer salary averages at $50,525 per year in the United States, a little over $42,000 in Germany, almost $79,000 in Switzerland, roughly $50,000 in Norway. And last but not least, let’s take a look at the numbers of a booming IT scene in Europe – a Ukrainian web designer would ask for about $18,000 per year in wage.
You may notice that Ukrainian web designer specialists have the lowest rates here. One should not judge the latter by their salary expectations, which is the lowest here, but rather take a look at designers of the firm’s portfolio, which can usually be found online. Ukrainian web designers are very talented and work with huge international companies in various industries. An ever-growing IT community in Ukraine gives fundamental knowledge of the profession and offers endless development possibilities within this challenging sphere.
Bottom Line
Web development is a promising field that can bring many benefits to a business. In the modern world of the technological ‘arms race’, it is paramount to pay attention to your online presence and invest in your website’s development.
Hopefully, now you have an idea of how a decent website’s home page looks like and will use that knowledge to your benefit. Remember that this is not the situation where you should be saving money. Thus, get ready to pay some real cash for your website developer. However, if you want to get that high quality for a low price – take a look at Ukrainian developers. These specialists will be worth and bring your website to the top in no time.
Post written by:
Mobilunity – a Ukrainian-based nearshoring company that provides dedicated development teams for businesses around the globe. Their model provides access to a talent pool of 160,000+ Ukrainian software engineers, all while allowing the client to remain in complete control of their development process.
