A website’s a website, right? Wrong. An outdated, confusing or broken website will hurt your brand. We’re not saying it might hurt your brand, we’re saying it will hurt it.
So how can you set yourself up to succeed? You can create an awesome website by totally nailing your web design from the beginning. But what is web design, actually? Read on if you want to learn what web design is all about, why it matters so much and how to get it right.
Web design is what creates the overall look and feel when you’re using a website. It’s the process of planning and building the elements of your website, from structure and layout to images, colors, fonts and graphics.
Web design has numerous components that work together to create the finished experience of a website, including graphic design, user experience design, interface design, search engine optimization (SEO) and content creation. These elements determine how a website looks, feels and works on various devices.
Web design is different from web development, which is the actual coding that makes a website work. When you’re building a website, you need both web design and web development. Although you can find web designers who are also web and UX developers, these are distinct skill sets.
Web designers take your ideas and turn them into a mockup that shows what your future website will look like. Web designers handle the creative part of designing a website.
Web developers—also sometimes called engineers or coders—take the mockup your web designer made and translate it into a coding language so it can be displayed on the web. They make websites functional, which often means custom-coding widgets and other tools.
A user experience developer, also known as a UX developer, is the one who makes your website user-friendly. They have technical skills as well as design skills and put them to work creating websites that attract and keep visitors.
First impressions really matter. We can’t stress this point enough: if you don’t have a strong web presence, you’re holding your brand back.
Prospective customers who search the web for your brand and find nothing might think you’ve gone out of business. If they search and find something subpar, they’ll get the impression that you don’t care much about your company or product. Make every relationship that begins on your website a great one by getting your web design right.
Now that you know what’s what and who’s who, let’s look at some tell-tale signs of great web design and what distinguishes it from not so great web design.
Good web design isn’t subjective. With other types of design, like illustration or sticker design, a lot of what constitutes “good” is up to the viewer’s taste. With web design, the line between “good” and “not good” is much more defined. A well-designed website is a website that perfectly creates the experience your visitor is looking for.