Website design and its impact on brand and SEO is much more than extravagant visuals, Flash and Freshness.
Web Design And Your Brand
The Website as a Brand is a Coming Together of Various Diverse Elements
Lets get one thing straight. Web design doesnt just have an impact on your online brand but your brand as a whole. So, it must be given the importance it deserves.
The brand of any company or individual is built on how others perceive that company or individual. Essentially, the design of a website seeks to play an important role in ensuring that the target audience looks favorably at the business or individual, .
What are the various aspects of web design that impact Brand Building?
The Logo
While a logo might not be considered an element of website design, a relevant logo plays a big role in the scheme of things.
A logo that is a perfect visual representation of the companys purpose, mission, and values has an impact on the websites design.
In fact, in corporate websites, its the colors and textures, font, or the overall design of the logo that acts as a frame of reference for the website design as a whole.
Website Experience
Branding is all about giving your website visitors a great user experience. This in turn is determined by the websites design.
If you offer users layout clarity, this becomes a part of your brand.
Simple, easy to use navigation is another fundamental part of the branding experience as are pages that load quickly.
The website design as a whole should be able to complement these aspects and serve to strengthen them.
All great websites extract a positive response from their website visitors through intuitive user experience, which is a result of a coherent and user friendly website design.
Encourage Recall
Certain design aspects that encourage recall.
A successful brand is more about recall value than anything else.
Innovative use of design elements helps encourage recall value of the brand. For example, the use of images the human mind can instantly recollect. The use of such images in website design, customized to be relevant to a particular website, helps website visitors recall the website and in doing so recollect the brand.
The placement of the logo at crucial junctures on the website is yet another way a design helps in brand recall.
Credibility
Website design in its own way helps build your online reputation. A clean and uncluttered design is the mark of a company that knows what its doing and what it wants to say.
Credibility is also an outcome of design that doesnt come across as trying too hard to make an impression, but makes an effort to be easily understood. All in all, website design that maintains a logical structure and offers a clearly defined flow of information helps build brand credibility.
A websites design helps build the character of a website and in doing so, also builds the brand, its personality, marketability and its efficiency.
Optimizing Design Page Layout, Navigation And CSS
Optimizing the use of CSS especially for headings, navigation and page layout can do wonders for your search engine optimization efforts.
CSS helps designers present plain text in an organized and visually appealing manner. SEO experts in conjunction with designers can use the design layout to optimize the site. Whne the layout is CSS controlled the SEO/designer can easily rearrange the layout of the code to optimize the site. They can also control how the various design elements can be loaded to improve user experience and crawlability. The use of CSS in design also helps present the layer of content first, which means search engine crawlers are able to crawl through the content without entering into a conflict with the design.
Related:
- How to Prepare for a Web Design Project (Ryan Cowles)
- The Emotional Use of Colors on Your Website (Brian Farrell)
- Six Things I Learned When I Redesigned My Website (Kelly Kautz)
Design is truly essential for the user experience. Not everyone has an eye for it, so hiring a good designer is a good idea in many cases.
A confusing navigational structure will hurt the user experience and ultimately drive away customers.
I really like the factors that this article covered. I bought the book ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ (in portuguese ~ since I live in Brazil) and it has really helped me understand how to improve things on my sites.
All the best,
Eren
I agree with this post, the overall design definitely plays an important role, but eventually i believe the content is more important, being in the business for over 4 years now, i have a belief, the websites with extravagant designs are good for the corporations are good only if the company has not much to showcase. I know many will disagree with me, but it is CERTAINLY a fact!
A good design and usability certainly helps a website, I have left a website before because the design put me off or because I struggled finding what I wanted.
A good design and usable website can have a significant effect on your website.