18/05/2018
Looking for website design stats of 2018? We’ve got all you need to know right here.
Your business has a website. Great! But it hasn’t been updated since 2009. Less great.
While having a website is one of the most important things you can do for your business, you can’t have one built and then just leave it, expecting it to be as effective as the years go by. Like any other form of marketing for your business, a professional website needs dedicated time and work across the course of its lifespan. After all, you want to keep it up to date and fresh in the eyes of your consumers.
Let’s take a look at some statistics to see if your website needs a well-deserved update.
You could have the slickest workforce imaginable and offer a wonderful service but if your website is shoddy, it’s going to reflect poorly on you. Your website could be the first impression that a consumer has on you, so them coming face to face with a poor or outdated design isn’t really putting your best foot forward.
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to design, that simply isn’t the case. When it comes to designing a website, it can be easy to overload it with colour, features or links without even realising how this is ruing your aesthetic.
Websites will always need updating periodically. Times change and what people consider a ‘modern style’ with it, so what looked good five years ago probably isn’t going to hold up today. Can you honestly say that you’re the same business that you were a few years ago? Make sure your website design always reflects the improvements that you’re making as a company.
When it comes to website design, we’ve come a long way since dull whine of the dial-up tone and the torturous wait of pictures slowly crawling down the page as they render. Today, people expect almost instantaneous load times for websites if they’re on a stable internet connection with the average load time of a page nowadays being 3 seconds. Most people are going to jump ship or complain if it takes longer than that on both desktop and mobile.
You can have the most amazingly crafted website known to man, but if it takes too long to load, not many people are going to stick around to explore. Having a slow website may also have people judging the efficiency of your business, so it’s always good to check load speeds every few months.
Luckily, there are a number of websites that will check for free. (Like HERE)
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 1000 times on this blog: if your website design isn’t mobile-responsive then there’s basically no point in having one.
Since the invention of the smartphone, people have been searching on the go a lot more. Having a website that doesn’t work well on the smaller screen could lose you some valuable business.
A mobile version of your website can’t just be the desktop version but smaller. People use their phones in an entirely different way to their computers, with people scrolling a lot faster and space being much tighter.
Despite the smaller screen size, customers on smartphones should still be able to use the majority of features on your website. Buttons and links should be large and easily-clickable and having a click-to-call feature on your business’ phone number is a great way to take advantage of the fact they’ll already be browsing on mobile.
It may seem like a fairly obvious point, but it’s a crucial part of your website design anyway: It must be simple and easy to navigate. Depending on what you want out of your website i.e.: sales, brand awareness, people making contact, you have to make sure that those features are displayed prominently on the landing page to encourage action.
Having your phone number and contact email clearly visible on most pages is a good start. You’d be surprised how short the human attention span is, and if your contact information isn’t clearly present, odds are your website visitors aren’t going to spend too long looking for it. This is especially true if they just casually came across you while browsing.
If you’re offering a product or service, having it available to purchase on your website will do wonders for your sales. E-commerce is a huge market nowadays with the ability to purchase goods over the internet a service that consumers are now very much used to. If you aren’t already taking advantage of all that an e-commerce website could do to help the spread of your business, then you could be missing out on a lot of potential sales.
The ease of being able to buy online is a great way to help expand your customer base as well. Not having an online store is going to limit your customer reach as people nowadays can and will be incredibly lazy when it comes to buying things. Not everyone is going to want to physically travel somewhere to buy something and prefer the convenience of delivery if they can’t find the time to go out.
In an age where almost everything can be done over the internet, if you aren’t becoming part of the online market then you’re missing out.
If all that information is making your head spin, we don’t blame you. Creating an effective and responsive website can seem like a daunting task. Luckily, we’ve been web designing since 2001. Our web developers have seen styles comes and go and watched how the technology changed. With screens getting bigger and websites more complicated, if you choose us to create your website design, you’re benefiting from years of experience as well as sitting happily with the knowledge that we always custom design every page, never working from a cheap template.
Check out our work here and make sure to follow our social media for all the latest digital marketing updates.
