Is Web Design Still Relevant In 2019?

In this exciting era of fast-growing technology, the Internet has crept into our lives in a way that even the most out-there science fiction creators of the 20th century couldn’t have envisioned.

The internet is our most important point of social contact, with its sprawling presence making social networking easier than ever before. We’ve all become media experts, wise political pundits, and viral jokesters. Merely having an online presence has become a multi-million dollar industry in itself, through Instagram and YouTube.

Heck, Google recently attained quantum supremacy.

All this awesome sci-reality madness aside, the impact on business owners is arguably the most profound, over the last few decades. Now, we literally have a global market for our products and services. But is having a website still important in this supercharged digital era?

Social media is one of the fastest ways of establishing your digital presence – but with the ability to connect with customers quickly, the usefulness of designing a website is called into question. Why should you part with your hard-earned cash to build a new website when you can create a Facebook page for your business in a couple of hours?

The answer to these questions is pretty simple. Your social media platforms merely serve as a conduit to your real home: your website and its beautiful, innovative web design.

Think of your social media as your nice shiny car – it gets you attention and takes you from A to B. But if you’re living in it instead of in a house, you look like a loser.

Here are 5 good reasons you should keep thinking of your website as the home for your brand.

1. Great Web Design Personalizes Your Brand

Web design lets you narrate your story through elements such as copy, images, videos and the layout. These elements contribute to forming a platform that is completely your own.

Websites let you have creative freedom for your online presence. Social media is uniform, so your brand gets lost in the noise of standardised design and colours.

2. Web Design Gets You Found Online

South Africans spend more time online than Americans and Europeans. This is hard to believe, but stats don’t lie. That means that out of the 63000 Google searches happening every second globally, we’re definitely looking up a LOT of stuff online.

With this knowledge, the importance of having a powerful search presence makes perfect sense. It’s not that easy to rank highly on Google, and if you’ve only got social media accounts, you’re basically running a 100m sprint against Usain Bolt.

Once someone clicks on your site, you have around 7 seconds to convince them to stick around. But with a well-designed website and search engine optimization, you at least have a fighting chance of getting browsed.

Related: 16 Frequently Asked Questions About SEO In Web Design

3. Websites Let You Get the Best Marketing ROI

Websites let you track and analyse your visitors’ information in a much more powerful way than social media platforms. You can track useful information such as: where are your visitors coming from? What are they searching for? How long do they spend browsing your site? What pages are they browsing?

Websites are an analytical goldmine that let you fine-tune your marketing strategy, and spend less to convert more.

4. Great Web Design Inspires Confidence in Your Business

The digital world is vast and varied. We’ve all been on those websites that give you some info, but don’t exactly give you confidence in the company providing that info. If their site doesn’t load quickly, or it’s hard to read on mobile devices, or difficult to navigate, you’ll wonder why they can’t be bothered to fix these issues.

What kind of service can you expect from a company that doesn’t give a damn about their online presence? While they might be perfectly competent in some areas, a bad UX (user experience) on their website might make you look elsewhere.

5. Web Design Is Inspirational (and Aspirational!)

As a business owner, you obviously keep an eye on what your competition is doing. If they’re doing something very, very right, you want a piece of that action.

The same principle applies to your website, and its design. Your website inspires you, your competition, and your visitors. OK, it might feel irritating when people try and copy what you have, but take it as a compliment. At the end of the day, the free market encourages ALL of us to do better, supply better products and services, and so on.

You get to hone your brand and online presence in ever-evolving ways, and grow your business in the process.

So now you’ve got some reasons to pay attention to your web design, where do you go now? You have the option of building your own site with a DIY system like Wix, but bear in mind that you’re limited by your creative skills and web development experience.

If you really want to impress potential customers with a well-built and visually striking website that speaks to your brand, you’re better off employing the services of web design professionals.