Upgrade Your Website: Benefits of Consulting Web Designers and Developers
Found yourself needing a website lately? Whether it’s for your business, services, or merely personal, realizing your need for a website can be daunting but exciting. It’s tempting to go the DIY website builder route to accomplish the task. However, these DIY website builders can box your creativity in with limited customization and adherence to their pre-made templates, leaving you with a lackluster website.
But why should you look for outside help? Maybe you’re looking to build a website from the ground up or refresh your current one. Consulting web designers and developers brings various benefits to help you upgrade your website. Web designers and developers’ expertise allows your website to be fully optimized in form and function.
UPGRADE YOUR WEBSITE’S VISUALS
When you’re meeting new people, first impressions are crucial. It’s no different for your website. For websites, first impressions are 94% related to their visual design. From a Stanford study on web credibility, a positive visual impact ranks among the study’s top 10 guidelines for making your brand look trustworthy. So it’s safe to say that your website’s looks do matter!
Keeping it Trendy & Competitive
Outdated websites can harm your brand. It might be easier to think you’re saving money by not updating your website by thinking: “It still gets the job done, doesn’t it?”. However, if your website looks stuck in the past, consumers might think your business also lacks the effort to innovate. To avoid looking outdated, you should update your website every 3-4 years, depending on how often trends rotate.
It can be hard to keep up with today’s ever-changing trends. Web designers have lots of experience observing trends to judge which are outdated, which are fleeting, and which are sticking around.
It’s also important to see how your competitors operate. Web designers will take time to research and analyze your brand’s competition and their websites. What looks good? What doesn’t work well? What can we do differently to be better? Web designers and developers ask and answer these questions as they work. Their result is a website that blends current trends and competitive research to stand out.
Nitpicky Design Decisions
If you’re DIYing your website and aren’t already familiar with the basics of web design, you’ll probably run into design questions you’ve never thought of before. What’s the best font size? What font should I even use? Does this box need to be center or left-aligned? Does it matter at all? Finding these answers will cause you to spend more time researching than ever anticipated.
Since it’s what they do, web designers and developers already know the basics regarding website visuals. Consulting them for your website’s look will save you time from worrying about little, nitpicky design decisions.
See how we approach design decisions by looking at our website case studies!
Sticking with Your Brand
Ensuring your business creates the same look and feel in person and across online platforms is crucial in making your brand look professional and credible. This includes maintaining consistency with color palettes, fonts, photography, and more. Although brand cohesion is vital across social media, your website is your home base among these platforms.
Using a wide range of colors or fonts will make your brand look inconsistent. Though, being creative within your brand’s boundaries can be tricky. Web designers and developers understand how to innovatively build out your brand through your website while sticking to your brand’s guidelines.
UPGRADE YOUR WEBSITE’S EXPERIENCE
Although visuals play a significant role in creating a positive reaction to your website, how people feel while interacting with it will determine if they will return to it. Websites can’t just look good. To get the job done, they must be functional as well.
Making Matters Easy
No one likes confusing websites. They make small tasks incredibly painful. Something that should’ve taken a matter of minutes is taking longer. You waste time because you can’t find what you’re looking for. With that in mind, you’ll want your website to be organized and easy to follow so users are happy to return to it.
Making an easily navigable website can be much more complicated than you think. People’s trains of thought often differ in how to accomplish tasks or get from A to B. Something logical to you may confuse the person next to you.
Through research, testing, and even analytics, web designers and developers know how to upgrade your website’s usability by improving content placement, user flows, and more to make your users’ experience fast and efficient.
Jumping Between Devices
Today, just over half of all internet traffic comes through phones. Your website should look stellar and work optimally, not just on desktops but on any device. A functional website should adjust its layout to the varying dimensions of phones and tablets. A non-responsive website becomes annoying to operate on mobile devices. You end up having to pinch, zoom, and pan over to navigate, and the buttons are often too small to press.
Some DIY website builders may offer automatic responsive mobile design or not at all. Their responsive design outcome is often limited, adjusting the main bones of web pages but not all visual elements. By consulting web designers and developers, you can rest easy that your website looks great on all devices because they check and adjust for mobile responsive design.
Being Accessible
No one likes getting FOMO, and that goes for the internet too. Everyone deserves accessible information and services on the web, especially at a time when people rely on the internet more than ever. For accessible website content, it’s essential to remember neurodivergent people and how neurodiversity and content creation overlap. Similarly, web design aesthetics and layouts can create barriers for people with disabilities. Seemingly simple choices of color or font weight can deny people information.
Designers and developers can design with web accessibility standards in mind or even create a website with responsive, accessible design, so all of your users can have a positive experience on your website.
Click the little guy on the left of this blog to see an accessibility widget in action, or check our latest web design and our latest website build: Tulane University’s costofinequity.org.
UPGRADE YOUR WEBSITE WITH ONLINE OPTIMISM
Don’t know where to start looking for web designers and developers? Don’t worry; you don’t have to go far. Here at Online Optimism, we have you covered with an excellent team of designers and developers to help you create a website that fits best for you and your business’ needs. Whether you want to work in person with our New Orleans web designers or virtually with staff across the country, our experienced team is ready to help. Curious about our latest website builds? Check them out in the website gallery. Or, if you’re ready for your website, contact us today!