They say that content is king and this is amazing because we can all put words onto paper. We learned how to write in school and even if you’ve forgotten how to do it without a handful of spelling mistakes and bad grammar it will only take you a few months of practice to rediscover the basics. This means within a short amount of time people can have a website up and running, but is this enough for a business to have great success? Is the written word all you need?
You’ll soon discover it’s not and if you want your site to take off you will need a great design. Everything about a website needs to be visually beautiful because it doesn’t matter how great your words are if people don’t think your website looks equally as good. There are lots of reasons why this might be, but at the end of the day you need to maximize your chances of success and if you’re challenged when it comes to design work you might need to hire someone. Let’s look at some of the jobs you might need them to do.
Start with the logo
The logo is one of the easiest things you can design yourself and that means it’s something everyone tries to do. When you look at some of them it leaves a lot to be desired. People that can’t design anything maybe choose a random graphic and put it next to some text. Think about how much a logo would cost if you got it designed by a professional, which isn’t too much. Now try and work out if that amount of money is worth looking unprofessional to your visitors.
Building a big list
When people don’t build a list they don’t make much money, so they sign up for a service like Aweber and start trying to get the email addresses of as much people as possible. They now think the battle is over and their list will grow, but they are missing the point. With a proper design their opt-in box will get much more subscribers and they will make much more money. Sometimes it costs money to make more and this is one of those times.
Selling a product
You wouldn’t walk into a store and buy something if the box was falling apart because you couldn’t trust the product. If the box is falling apart is could mean the product is worthless because the seller doesn’t think it’s worthy of nice packaging. The online equivalent would be trying to sell an eBook that had a horrible cover. Because we love pretty things it means we are put off by something that looks like it’s been dragged under a bus.
Special icons
You’ve probably seen a lot of big websites that use their own special icons in places like the navigation bar. Sometimes a graphic showing you what you’re clicking is more effective than using text. You don’t see this very often on smaller websites and why do you think this is? It’s because they don’t bother going out and hiring a designer, yet all the big websites are doing it. Does this mean you should be copying the successful people, or the ones who are still building their site?
Your main design
This could include the background, color scheme, font type, and a huge amount of other things that gives a website its look. Those are all things you could definitely do yourself because the themes and templates you have nowadays ensures even the non-tech savvy people can make something nice. Nice and amazing are two different things and a professional designer will be able to put something together way better than you ever could because of their experience.
About the Author: Nancy Martin is a web designer and says that web designing is one such field where creativity is at its best. She recently attended a seminar held by Vancouver web designer association and was very impressed by the techniques they use for designing.